We were bent bears with brown backs
wrestling through Californian lilacs
battering thigh and carving trench-deep bootprint
tumbling into bundles of rabbit's ear and catmint
I on top "like the pope and his rabbis!"
I called your glasses 'crutches of the eyes'
I pinned your arms so you looked like Jesus
some limb in your hair with the broken camelias
a grazed knee where your breasts would soon rise
like hot loaves
and you didn't say
"In seven years you'll crave this kind of victory
but in, of all things, poetry!"
and I didn't say
"In seven years, I'll have wanted you like this
for at least four years
but I'll keep that for my diary."
In fact, I planned to become a recluse
and tend to gardens in abbeys
build little rockeries and weave a sun hat
but! Your freckles are like the pepper
before the sneeze of creeping juniper
Your style is distant, cruel and high
thunder in the corona of narcissi
