“...because in the dying world it was set burning.”

                                                            —Galway Kinnell

We are not making love but

all night long we hug each other. 

Your face under my chin is two brown

thoughts with no right name, but opens to

eyes when my beard is brushing you.

The last line of the album playing

is Joan Armatrading’s existential stuff, 

we had fun while it lasted.

You inch your head up toward mine

where your eyes brighten, intense, 

as though I were observer and you

a doppled source. In the blue light

in the air we suddenly leave our selves

and watch two salt-starved bodies

lick the sweat from each others’ lips.

When the one mosquito in the night

comes toward our breathing, the pitch

of its buzz turns higher

till it’s fat like this blue room

and burning on both of us;

now it dies like a siren passing

down a street, the color of blood.

I pull the blanket over our heads

about to despair because I think

everything intense is dying, but you, 

you, even asleep, hold onto all

you think I am, more than I think, 

so intensely you can feel me

hugging back where I have gone. 

Words are loyal.

Whatever they name they take the side of.

As the word courage will afterward grip just as well 

the frightened girl soldier who stands on one side of barbed wire, 

the frightened boy soldier who stands on the other.

Death’s clay, they look at each other with wide-open eyes.

And words—that love peace, love gossip—refuse to condemn them.

—2016