What Do You Want of This Life?

1.

I confess, I’ve always approached your body

as a supplicant. My mountain temple, climbing

the million steps carrying a bowl of water.

You demand I not spill a single drop. Prayers

wheel around your hips. I whisper my deepest

desires on your inner thigh. You sleep, I kiss

a string of flags across your hairline in hopes

the wind catch my dream mantras and spread

into the spaces of the world. This zen peace,

a knowing, suffering peace I enjoy. All zealots

traverse the holy site, circle, genuflect, rounding

the white, snowy peaks of pert breasts, soft,

pliant shoulders, brisk cheeks. Better pilgrims

know to beg, collapse before you, come to ask.

2.

Patterns form and un-form from the blankets

we kicked off in the night. Left in some urgency,

the way a child leaves toys behind where they lay.

Our room, also, a plaything we spun around.

Happiness a balloon we take turns keeping afloat

with our restraint, with our easing into one another.

Summer diminished. Now long winter nights creak

open our windows of the tiny apartment, old brick

building next to new high-rises. Wood floors resume

their dance as bare trees. We burn the wall furnace

while we sleep. We wake in sweats, pierced into

our sheets. Insensible night. I wake up as morning

reestablishes the room. We’ve fallen onto each other’s

bodies, open-eyed. Everything, everywhere lustrous.

3.

Asleep, here, in my arm’s flexure. The dog at the foot

of the bed, and, elsewhere, the steady tactful pace

of the cat. You and I meet at every intersection

of the body. We drive into each other, eyes closed.

We collide, happily. What do you want of this life?

You worry you ask too much before bed, you said
once. Some water, a tissue, mind the dog, one more

cookie, one more kiss, one last tight grip around

the waist before we each slip apart into the rocky

outcrop of our dream’s desert lands. I ask for little

more than to keep answering this call. Who would

shake this off? I thought we’d fall into place all along.

Mad alchemists, not engineers. Every choice remade,

I think, could not recreate this startling reaction again.