naked into the cage with the lion, I

lay my enormous paws on your scalp I

take my great tongue and begin to

run the rasp delicately

along your skin, humming: as you enter

ecstasy, the hairs lifting

all over your body, I have never seen a

happier man.

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love

without love? Beautiful as dancers,

gliding over each other like ice-skaters

over the ice, fingers hooked

inside each other’s bodies, faces

red as steak, wine, wet as the

children at birth whose mothers are going to

give them away. How do they come to the

come to the come to the God come to the

still waters, and not love

the one who came there with them, light

rising slowly as steam off their joined

skin? These are the true religious,

the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

accept a false Messiah, love the

priest instead of the God. They do not

mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

they are like great runners: they know they are alone

with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardiovascular

health—just factors, like the partner

in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

single body alone in the universe

against its own best time.

Ecstasy

As we made love for the third day,

cloudy and dark, as we did not stop

but went into it and into it and

did not hesitate and did not hold back we

rose through the air, until we were up above

timber line. The lake lay

icy and silver, the surface shirred,

reflecting nothing. The black rocks

lifted around it into the grainy

sepia air, the patches of snow

brilliant white, and even though we

did not know where we were, we could not

speak the language, we could hardly see, we

did not stop, rising with the black

rocks to the black hills, the black

mountains rising from the hills. Resting

on the crest of the mountains, one huge

cloud with scalloped edges of blazing

evening light, we did not turn back,

we stayed with it, even though we were

far beyond what we knew, we rose

into the grain of the cloud, even though we were

frightened, the air hollow, even though

nothing grew there, even though it is a

place from which no one has ever come back.

III. The Children

Exclusive

(for my daughter)

I lie on the beach, watching you

as you lie on the beach, memorizing you

against the time when you will not be with me:

your empurpled lips, swollen in the sun

and smooth as the inner lips of a shell;

your biscuit-gold skin, glazed and

faintly pitted, like the surface of a biscuit;

the serious knotted twine of your hair.

I have loved you instead of anyone else,

loved you as a way of loving no one else,