Stay away from the voodoo, love.

Resist

the swamp music
the bells on her ankles
her feathered fan

and when she sways
at the hip—

goddess of sudden changes
patroness of prostitutes
and abandoned lovers—

chanting Mambo, terrible beauty.

Say nothing

when she leans close
(cinnamon, tree bark and, faintly, smoke)
and breathes

If you have no altar,
I am your altar.

Stay away from the voodoo, love—

her drumbeats and cypress trees,
her hocus pocus
honeylocust.

A battered heart lends
character, like an eye patch
or a cowboy hat.

I learned early
that to speak too soon
or too often
of love

gave words
and weight to
my little prophecy
of loss—

so I stopped speaking.
I carved and polished
my heart into
a Japanese puzzle box

that both discouraged
and excited
with a precise
sequence of 

sliding parts
half twists
secret drawers
and dead ends

so that

by the time 
hands trembled
with the imminence
of conquest

and before the 
contents
could disappoint,

I could be a safe
distance away

saying

*you must have broken it.

What a burning, broken universe—
incalculable, devastating,
things we can't imagine.
We attach names familiar to us
                    Titan, Europa, Calypso
but they are still mighty and immeasurable, terrifying—

but don't think of all that.
It's too big.
It's too sad.

Think of this:

It's sublime and impossible that we even exist
with our
soft flesh and our wet eyes,
our music, our sins, 
our jealous lovers,
our moments of bliss, 
and love— god, love…
more immeasurable
more incalculable
than the universe, 
than whatever it is
that the universe wonders about.

Our smallness shouldn't humble us.
We are tiny demigods
watching the universe expand
from our lawn chairs
while we eat ripe peaches
with sticky hands and smiling mouths.

An erogenous haunting,
I thrill at his wanting

but more,
I thrill at his pause

to let me unravel
his tangle of wishes

and instill my own meter and rhyme.

He bends to my needing,
my sweetness deceiving.

(but then, I think his may be, too)

Hunter or hunted,
his heartbeat has quickened;

for this moment, at least,
he is mine.

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.

Towel clutched loosely
warm, blushing skin, damp with steam
cool condensation
distillation of lust, his
fingers wrapped in her wet hair.