presents itself a bride
fluted in moonlight,
laid over the broken beach, herself broken over it,
draped like lace in foam over rock
speaking in unveiled quiet
(as though within a closed door)
what I had thought a distant source.
But when I touch her outflung heart—
veined and made of silver and dark,
press my palm over the slick inlets,
those places of quiet entry
distilled as though for a purification rite, a clear carafe
giving seamlessly the moment it receives—
she opens into the sea so unmiraculously, so plainly and completely,
with a strength gathered up, a touch unwithheld—
offers herself like need and like hunger, a body flowering open amid thirsting ground—
never to return empty.
A stranger at the door
cup in hand, thrumming with more.