by Shanna Germain
(05/02/07)
Fire Escape
After a burn, everything tastes like
salt and ash. In the fire-station bathroom,
one lover is the same as another
to skin cross-hatched by heat.
Wild and willing as dogs uncaged,
our tongues lick cool liquid wherever
they find it: rivulets beneath chin-bones,
tributaries that trickle between seams.
Forgetting leaves no time to undress,
only for living and this cool-tiled
denial of the way we enter
flames willingly, nearly protected.
Yes, we've been here before, the way
I melt over the sink, offer my
salt-sea skin to suck as though I hope
it might nourish or quench.
Tomorrow, the fire will make
the paper, news and near-rescues
to be read over coffee and then
pushed away, with a grateful
shove and shudder. Everything could go
this quick: A door opening on flames,
that first step inside, the long low moans
that say someone here is nearly alive.
Ritual
Every Sunday
after the paper after the coffee
after the football scores have been checked one last time,
we strip naked and climb back beneath the covers.
It seems, sometimes, like we're cheating,
making an appointment for sex as though we're seventy,
and not 27 and 29.
It's a secret we do not share with friends;
they would say: what of passion? what of
being taken on the kitchen floor at midnight?
But passion is easily lost, and cannot
find its way to the kitchen floor at any time of day.
On Sundays, we have time to linger,
our fingers raising the dead flesh,
the parts of our bodies we had forgotten
we owned during the week.
In the daylight, our bodies do not glisten
Like golden statues. Our skin bears the marks
of so much human hope, an idol in the pocket
whose belly is rubbed raw with desire.
It seems, sometimes, like we're laughing
in the face of god, spending Sundays
curled around each other, not yet married.
But then I remember the one thing I took
from Sunday school: Be good to your body, they said,
Your body is a temple. Your body is prayer.
The Poet's Companion - by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux