It's more than a shift
   in the fault lines
   as I drive through 
   Texas winds 
   you told me once 
   were raining sand. I wonder now 
   if this is what I feel 
      or traces of 
      a thunder summer morning.
   Remember on the patio, how 
   I slipped behind you naked
   in your chair as you 
   rolled a cigarette. 
   We pushed the world away,
   the sun at rest behind a 
   rain that carried on its breeze 
      her mist 
      across our skin. Your 
   lips, wet from cloudburst spray, 
   descended to the
   sigh of my hips, my hollows, 
   in slow unhurried
   sensuality; I'd never 
   seen your eyes so finely tuned,
   as you bent me back across
      the wooden bench. 
   The sky, a sauna bath, hung
   above young deer as they lay
   on sheets of silver grass  
   in a rain-soaked sleepless field. 
   Your umbrella body 
   over mine, dark over light,
   the crackling sky crashing 
   through you; my head, 
   rocked against the
   chimes as you made me
   new again. 

   Above white dashes
   on the heated summer road,
   sun-bleached air blows another 
   gust of sand across 
   the windshield of my car. 
   Pond illusions rise above
   the asphalt, black and softened
   in the scorch of afternoon.
   From the other side of 
   someone else's mid day 
   mirage, I thicken into view.
   My mouth, 
      fixed to the taste
   of your salt neck and to
   your legs, bronzed in these
   days without me.
   My heart rises like a bird
   above the sea, spilling over
   in all of the 
      beautiful eccentricities
   of you, in the moments put away, 
   and I become not woman, but 
   horse and cart to carry 
   these armfuls 
   of sweet emptiness.



12 aug 02 
M Madison