after making love, I am
most purely grateful for this
other human form that
yields itself to mine; my
quaking flesh now charged by
gravity and increase. The moment
is no longer marked by a
head splitting release, Hephaestus
hammering the dome of Zeus,
but now an exonerating shiver
felt on this known human
escarpment --
I say this because I’ve visited
the black land; some days so far
beneath the air that motion
plays on a continuously receding
horizon; choking on shadows in
corners full of broken glass.
And here, in this early summer, late
budding trees move in the evening
wind under a charcoal sky.
I’ve drawn the drapes to lie
supine beneath a ceiling that
lowers like some funereal
canopy on a coffin. It’s your
reaching through the fabric that
brings me up to breathe -
Neil Dyer