Would that I could lie beside you,
sharing silence, feeling the compulsion
to do nothing, to say nothing--
but to be in your beauty. To share
breaths with you, the rhythms of our
breathings syncopated, complementary,
as if a basso continuo for loving.
That our toes touch playfully is not too
much; that I might take your little finger
and kiss it is no abridgement; that I
might savor your salt-sweetness is
no sin, but a sign perhaps to begin again,
in time. But now I am beside you,
and the world and all its heavens
is a wondrous place.
Copyright 2019 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.