A Poem for St Valentine's Day

Silk

It was around your neck, or I was, with my ideal hands
loose about your ideal shoulders lost in a storm
of ruffs and frills in the middle of a night’s sleep.

The sleep was silk, or I was, slithery with silence
in the rain that was an articulation of something
I did not understand but would continue to trouble

the sleep remaining to me. A wardrobe left open
always brings good luck, and maybe this was luck
folding out of the mud of the shower, in the earth

beneath the trees, where I, or it, or that sheer bolt
of silk lay unrolled, unfolded, my ideal body
curling its lip in disgust and, I must admit,

pleasure, at your neck and shoulders and your trees
and all the invited adulation of the rain
in that dead sleep where I was around your neck,

where your head emerged out of its shimmer,
or my shimmer, or that nothing that was sleep
or simply took the tree’s or sleep’s or my own form

and you lay there, pure silk, pure storm.


from New and Collected Poems, 2008