Your Ghosts: a Liturgy (6/9/11)

Abandoned in the rolled down vigil an arbiter,
a parley with phosphorous haints – nocturne
and humpswathed, alive with renegade sounds
and shifts while the gut expands, alights;

I shuck the night. I gather myself up
in slow thigh dread, all humdrum beast
while you wrest and build – and come quiescent
to be blessed, to meet the day as if whole.

Laudatory entanglements in the grey light –
sneaking under the limp arm’s grasp
for a turbid embrace and then sidling, backing,
as you flood back down into sleep

and I ride out into those little hours
where yet I hold your form, your body primed
for work as vital as the day is long,
the quickening mitts grasping naught to themselves

and the milkspot nape dawdling in the rush of light.
More beautiful. More awake. A rupert’s drop
with its tail untouched, a crack front holding,
forging and tumbling in the proofing mire.

All day I hold your form alive in mine
as you hold hers. Feel it winnow and glide
quite uncertain and sure, a Hesperian nymph
guiding my eventual way on heated lanes

to both of you, at last, to round my retreat
into embrace, to close and complete
and greet you again – alive, awake, whole
and utterly wanted, loved, utterly at peace.