Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—

isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and Evening.

O, the beautiful making they do—
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—

Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?

^{I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem.
A building’s a building…. I mean, it’s all structure.
—John Hejduk}

I need villanelles of you pulling 
my breath like lines moving down

the page and the promise of rhyme 
bending my ear. I need a sestina

of touch, patterns of palm, stroke,
skim, brush, and rub returning—

a cycle of sound and pressure I
apprehend in my bones. I need

the triolet’s refrain rolling off 
your tongue like a sample, new

and nuanced here and here and here.
It’s all structure is why I need angles

of play, the love our bodies build.
I miss you. The ache's more sour

than a dropped foot, a forced rhyme.
If you're free from me too long,

what will you jettison first? Meter?
Lines? Come home. Our sonnet’s

the fourteen creases in the sheets. 
A couplet of light greens your eyes

only inches from mine when iambs
ascend atop iambs. Please. I need

you in haiku: distilled in syllables,
laid bare in the last line’s turn.

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

To-day the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart sweetening light! 
  Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth. 
  The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light. 
   The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion. 
   Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. 
The heaven’s river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad.