Forms of Love

If You Should Ever Return

If you should ever return to me in the full light of your nakedness,
will I still be forced to hide my eyes in the hair between your legs
or will I stand, remote, unmoved, dumb in my dark room?
So many times before, rather than be blinded by you, I closed my eyes
and bared my lips, tasting of your radiance, wetting the light.
My memories of you are of sound and touch, of taste and smell,
the sighs of salt rising from the seas, a skin that scents of silk,
a sweet fluttering riding the dust of our out-stretched wings.

My love, my distant wondering breeze, the breath in me departs, shaking.
When I think some day I might see you, dull, unclothed, in a room
without shadows, the unillumined bed, I promise the last
lingering feathers of my tongue that I will lift the candles I prepare
for us and singe my eyes in their bright sockets before the sight
of you displaces one memory of my blind probing into your tangled rain.