Mobile
by Travis Diehl
Remember the weight of
one clutching and whiskied dusk
in particular. We stayed early in bed,
pulled shade before the creeping stars,
pressed blood from the pillows.
So obscure was the quiet that followed that
you, a curled fetus by the headboard,
shook with animal uncertainty,
while poet me paced nakedly,
star-imploring, cosmos-uninspired.
Touch your crescent scars and recall
my lover’s practiced tenderness
as I sensed your most toothsome tissue—
shoulder, buttock, earlobe—
and conceived an arrangement.
You, with stainless fingerscoops,
made craters of the dimples
at the small of my back,
plucked a shallow rib,
and with wiry stolen sinew
balanced our excavation over the bed
so that, supine as bleary infants,
we could hold with heavy eyelids
the languid, even orbits of our flesh.
Remember how it hung:
a spindly dripping constellation
above our fitful sleep.
