Seduction

It’s not that I want to tell you something,

it’s where I want to tell you. The confession

presses the way my breast feels against

my guitar when I play it. I feel you

in my body like an orchard hears wind.

I want to take you to a lake in the middle

of farm country, I want our hair tangled

in the fields, indistinguishable and fine

as the threads of a corn husk––the air

as cold and as sweet and as yellow and

as exposed. We could talk with our hands

in the blue hour, go home and shell

our dinner: cosmic centers, charcoal

smoke, permutations of heat like graphite

stains on the right side of your hand.

I lived in a summer house once,

blackberries in the driveway,

skinny legs of arachnids everywhere,

and in the shower I had to kill emerald

beetles with my flat palm every night.

I loved it: how wet and irrepressible

and alive. Inside meant nothing.

It might as well have been

the ancient garden where Romans

put on plays and danced naked

in mint patches. The air crackled

with the shiny breath of other things,

and I’d let the windows open

while I laid in bed with my legs up

playing the same dream soft

magenta rub of a song for hours.

I voyeured the neighbors, let the

cat step on my body, his black

footprints like small echoes

in the ocean’s grammar. You are

as singular to me as the first page

of Middlemarch. You are the circle

I know to be heaven. You are the

endless August and sunburnt

face I feel compelled to leave

my life for. When I was little,

I’d come in from playing on

the hot concrete and lick

my knees because the dust

and sweat tasted just like

communion wafers. I will never

stop wanting to lick God

or you––let me turn my

mouth into the sound

a thousand cherry pits make

when you spit them into

a glass dish. I want to explain

that wanting you feels like

when I’d walk two miles

to milk cows in the rain––

manure up my legs, my hair in my mouth,

the cloying warmth of udders:

my spirit was so clean then.

I had a certain way of touching,

and I had to do it twice a day.

You make me feel like that,

like all these dull years in

the library have been a dream,

and tomorrow I’ll wake up

to a creature who needs me.