Tremor

Set in diamond pins
that acupuncture my back
are small fairy-lights.

Humming all the time,
sensitive to the signals
from my skin and soul.

What are they doing? 
Such delicate instruments
in my flesh body?

In voodoo moments,
when the circuit is complete,
they know and show me.

It’s that swift movement
passing over my shoulders
and the lights come on.

Mornings

I love the smell of your neck in the morning.
The smell of warm milk.
A babyish smell that comforts me.
I lie with my face in your neck
and breathe you in,
our bodies touching in every place that bodies can touch.

Sometimes if we wake up early,
we see the seeping sun through the blinds
flick palpitating bars of light onto the wall
that shiver and flicker and liquefy,
a pap that melts onto our faces as we lie,
you curled around me like a shell.

The morning sprinklers hiss and spray
and a smell rises up
of earth baked like bread,
cooled through the lull of the night,
now spattered and smattered
then drenched, it sucks the water in,
waking up with the dampening of its crust,
a smell of sop and cud.

Some days I wake first
and feel the breath of morning on my face,
the dense quiet of the earth about to sing,
and I itch to be out in it.
To feel my feet tender on the patio stone,
still cool from night.
To meet the cats
that tiptoe silently through the grass.
Alert already, a mew sounds small,
absorbed by a hush that is thick as cream.

But to lie in your arms till you wake,
or I wake you
with a stroke of your hair till you stir,
is perhaps better still.
You murmur and sigh
and the sun liquefies
like butter, onto our faces as we lie.
You're curled around me like a shell.