A WEEK TO GO Click
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Photo by Bob Gentry ©2001
Stanyan Entertainment
A Thought for Today
As long as we have children we are of
independent means.
A WEEK TO
GO
Daisies and some half striped
tulips have gone on living in the hotel bedroom for near half a week. I’ll
have new roses for you and lilacs trucked in from the country by the
barrel load. Bring me cider, if you can, Chatsford honey, some magazines
and books and the Pennsylvania chemistry your friend cooks up. I doubt
we’ll need it, but whatever’s fair.
I cannot wait to cup your buttocks in my hands and move down through your
legs to England’s heaven. To try again what has been tried and done - to
walk with you through sunlit London even in the absence of the sun. To lie
with you a hundred different ways and drive with you ahead through all the
summer days.
I had intended to describe your mouth to you while I was looking at it,
but another week of waiting is too long a time. Your mouth is velvet on
the inside like the underside of violets, or the outside of your eyes. Wet
it tastes like nothing half so much as your own mouth. Dry it hungers to
be wet.
Your breath sometimes at night is like a mist, a thin gray fog that warms
my neck when you move near. You seldom wake me though I drown in
perspiration, yours and mine. Unknowingly your mouth takes me off to
foreign places when my own rides against it. We are passengers on trains
and sailing ships with no destination, in no hurry. Time and again one
rides against the other, a tug of war of tongues so gentle that we might
not be touching tongues at all.
-from Folio No.7, Fall 1975
Sleep warm.
RM 5/24/01
Booking for "An Evening with
Rod McKuen" at the Riverton Rendezvous is open! Click below for
more details:
Riverton Concert Details
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Gary Burghoff o
Jane Byrne o
Roseanne Cash o
Tommy Chong o
Sybil Danning o
Joe Dumars o
Bob Dylan o
Billy Gilman o
Patti La Belle o
Jean-Paul Marat o
Elsa Maxwell o
Siobhan McKenna o
Wilbur Mills o
Lili Palmer o
James Peale o
Priscilla Presley o
Queen Victoria of England o
Kristen Scott Thomas |
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Our
souls exist to make us beautiful inside and out.
Women are the managers, executives who call
the roll and keep things straight and honest - with or without offices
or titles.
I think perhaps that we are running, yes.
Always away, never toward.
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SACRAMENT |
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I like my body
lying next to yours.
My leg against your leg and over it
the muscle quivering to touch
the luxury of thighs that open onto thighs.
I like our sighs together and I like
my body lying next to yours at night
and every morning.
I wear you
coming next to you
as I would clean cotton shirt
soft to the touch you are and tingling.
And everything you touch
is but a punctuation to yourself.
I love the loss of vagrancy inside your arms
your fingers swarming on my back
like bees attacking single flower.
The light from out your eyelids coming.
The puzzled humming in my ear
as you nod yes not having heard
the question that I asked.
Your hair unmasked for what it is-
a tangled web of craziness
is like a whim not taken up.
So too your mouth is glowing, fair,
runs hot and cold and in no pattern.
I like our elbows, noses, knees
interrupting rhythms that should be truer.
Your breasts are skillful, genius each,
priceless in a bed world
whose currency is chance.
I love the ample of you
and the lean
the part of you expecting flesh
and rising up to meet it.
The symmertry of you is what I love
odd angles too
those energy propelling sighs
and little cries from you.
The ivory underside of you
the tanned and glowing legs and arms.
I love the wind of you
as much as the unwinding.
The kindness of your inner ear
is more than I can bear to speak about.
All honey to the heart,
all pasture to the eyes
the size of you is one great breath
taken in, held, not expelled, nor ever.
Ingenious are your ankles, calves, hips
stepping stones to the great wonder
on ahead.
What I love most in all the world
is my own body next to yours.
It is a vanity, a wonderful conceit.
-from “Suspension Bridge,” 1984 |
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