Through the Bottom of A Wine Glass

Rather then speak my random desires for passing beauty
as if every woman was a sun setting across a lake or a flash
of wonder inspiring unchecked compulsions
I will commit more of myself to the page,
hold my words for the printed phrase, write my depraves
instead of spontaneously confessing my sensualist impressions,
and so temper my less than sober declarations.

For desire needs neither youth nor age to make
itself known, and urge needs neither encouragement
nor excuse to surge beyond where the unspoken
lingers. For if the greatest of lusts
is the yearning for sanctity, then the next greatest
burns only a little less complexly.

I don't hold it against me, for what man can carry
the sacred and the profane to their conclusions
without making himself ridiculous?

The knee bent in prayer
rises thigh-wise to the ways of
passion unbound, the parting of
appropriate constraint opens the lips of
pleasure, the groin feels the belly hungry thrust
to the breast where the heart races
to the pulse of neck and nape
filled with throaty exultations
that become psalms or the guttural utterances
of sweat and blood and spirit.

The imagined and the possible
are contoured by muscle and flesh,
by taste and holding and by
the rhythmic entering of inner urgency:
goodness and sweetness become salty from
refusing to speak because wisdom has had enough
and because the love that infuses intermingled senses
knows where defilement lurks and how sublimation
traces the sear of beauty and longing
to its source.

20 Year Old Honeymoon White Pants

I don't remember when I decided to work in my white, honeymoon pants
but it was summer, hot; and the thought of wearing a white shirt with white pants
seemed suitable for landscaping, but today, my pants tore on the job,
and throughout the day ripped down from my thigh like a leg-wound opening
to below my knee.
So I wear them with that one leg rolled up, the slit in the open thigh parting each time I kneel, causing me to remember that I had owned them for 20 years.
Last week, we would have been married two decades, the last ten years of which we lived apart, divorced. Last week's forgotten anniversary was remembered today, when the pants tore, when I remembered where they had come from.

As I kneel and rise I make the tear worse throughout the day.
And as I do, the loss that my ex-wife and I still share lingers.
She and I speak frequently but haven't yet spoken of that forgotten anniversary, and nor did she remind me of it at the time, she, who never forgets.

My mind negotiates its way to our 17 - nearly 18 - year old son who is
mourning a love withdrawn by a woman in his own life.

I take the scissors to my honeymoon pants and cut shorts out of them.

Tomorrow I will wear them while digging post-holes by hand,
and my knees will remember white linen lost to circumstance
while my bare thighs glisten in the humidex,
soil becoming dirt in the cool earth touched
as I lie with my ear to the garden bed.

My down-stretched hand scoops the ground within,
and I pull up clenched sand,
surrogate beaches walked newly wed twenty years ago
while pelicans flew sentinental over jetties
as we dreamed.