Can you draw me the shape of love?
*
John Donne was right after all;
the body is the book.
He is written into me, into every line
and recess, scored into hair skin bone,
etched on the pattern of the cell, carved
on the door of the heart. My fingertips
are branded with his name. He reads me
as a blind man does, with fingers and tongue;
his hands delve into the deepdown places,
the spaces between the ribs, melting the secret
emptinesses with the sweet solvency of touch.
He finds me in the chaos of myself,
and draws me into being.
And I am learning him, learning
the journey of him, the journey of the
cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
I trace his veins to their fire source and
dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
in the heart of a flame.
He is the poem I travel.
*
I am the shell by the sea, hollow, emptied, quiet,
burnt by the sun, lipped by gentle waves, waiting
for him to fill me.
I am the leaf dancing on the broad blade of wind,
spiralling up to graze the stars and drifting back down
to alight on his hair.
I am the bowl he shapes, looks in, lifts to his lips;
I am the clear water rippling his reflection,
locked in his hands.
I melt into the inky darkness of his shadow
and sheltering in his strength redraw the outlines
of a curious grace.
I am the drop of rain just learning the storm,
drawing the curve of a snow-petalled flower,
shaping a clear peace.
*
My phantom lover in the deep black jazz night,
his ghost hands whispering down the strings
of the heart and playing them with the lightest touch,
drugging the dreams with rich saxophone notes
of deep longing, binding the soul, shivering down
the bones and infusing them with a mute cry,
a sudden sharp ache of loneliness.
*
I want you to miss me when I’m not there -
I want you to watch after a disappearing back and wound yourself on the
sharp edges of an
absence -
I want a sudden remembrance to flood your senses, to wake a terrible
longing under the skin, to slice
into the heart and leave you crying out on this side of the night -
I want your arms to ache with emptinesses, your hands to clutch at forlorn
air, your ears to ring with
silences -
I want you to search the night and trace in the pattern of stars a foetal hope,
to listen for a breath of
voice in the haunting wind -
I want to haunt you, to lurk in the unknowing mind, to scorch your
fingertips with a remembered
warmth -
I want you to eat fire for me -
I want you to want me too.
*
Love brute and beast, rubbing against you hungrily, hesitantly, lapping at
the salt of you, wrenching at
your mouth-sweetness.
Love a savage knowing, a shock of recognition ripped from you, more than
feeling and deeper than
consciousness, rapped into the frame of bone.
Love a clarity of blindness, exhilarating and frightening, a mirror for a
flawed vessel, an act of faith,
forcing you to your knees.
Love an invisible circle binding you, anchoring your flight, building you a
homecoming.
Love a violence to shatter your peace.
*
Will you leave me here on the other side of the glass
with only a snatch of voice and the faint memory
of a fleeting touch to keep me?
*
We are one-winged angels just learning to fly,
riding the piercing sweetness of hope with a pair
of dreamer’s wings, shaped of a song tender
and tremulous, soaring high into the clear night
and waking all the stars to dance, a great golden
shower of exuberant exquisite joy.
This is our time, this diamond night, the
bewitching hour, this dreamtime perfumed
with the sandman sleep, this velvet wilderness
of a wondrous grace; and these our hands
will find each other.
Koh Tsin Yen
