Too Beautiful She was too beautiful, He decided When she rose the bedsheet slipped To the wooden floor Strewn with light, Thin muslin drapes luffed He remembered a song, the perspiration Just beneath her breasts, His awkward hands She left the bedsheet where it lay And with her tongue a poem crept in his ear Before he could have wondered how or Where she learned such things Looking back along the years He thought of the fallen bedsheet, The muslin drapes, the angle of the sun, Her patience with his youth, And how he pressed and pressed With nowhere else to go Maybe it was wrong, his ardour So unformed, breaking and crashing Against her beauty in the scattered light – Could love be so unfrayed? ________________________________________________________________________ Emanuel E. García, Sojourns, 2014 |