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.