Silken assassin, pharaoh of swift,
serrated deaths— you look so cute
with milk in your whiskers.

May gave us tall grass.
Clumsy hands pressed my clean hair
into the cool mud.

dame's rocket
lion's mouth
bittersweet

Love made, pillow fight;
you draw moons on my eyelids
and kiss them goodnight.

When you said
what we have is magic
I didn't think it meant
you'd disappear.

I pretend that your poems and 
my poems go
slumming in disguise;
carrying on in dark doorways
of riverfront bars—
tipsy, telling secrets,
spilling out into the sweet-smelling
night,
libertines 
more in love 
than they were before.

You rewrite me.

I learn the hieroglyph for longing,
the derivative of sigh.
Ours is a softly spoken love

and I'm a breathless scribe.