INTIMACY

Intimacy -
A paradox!
So it is to my lover.
For she wishes to be intimate with me,
Without intimacy
As though
Such a thing could be
In my mind,
In my heart.
And so she opens her body to me -
Most intimately,
And bids me
Come!
And I, in gratiitude
At this loving
So long in coming,
Weep tears of joy
Upon her sweet femininity.
Yet my lover says,
"Hush - do not weep."
For those tears are heavier by far
Than my manly weight
Upon her soft warm frame.
*
Yet there is another place
Of intimacy
Where I may not enter,
That is -
The intimacy of her precious time
Wherein souls come closer than bodies.
The labia of those, her days, are locked to me.
Though I deeply penetrate her inner-most self,
I may not penetrate
The vulva
Of that OTHER intimacy,
Her precious time,
The days of her significance
So miserly with-held from me.
*
My lover has said,
"No man shall ever possess me."
Is this not the essence of romance?
To possess the beloved?
I abandon myself to her
In loving -
So that
She may have my all!
And she abandons me
Most cruelly,
After that I have loved her so well.
No man shall possess my lover.
I hear the words.
I fear
Those words of self-fullfilling prophecy
Shall pursue her across the years
And come to haunt her soul.
And when the sparrows have flown from the nest,
And the leaves have turned to golden-brown,
And the branches lie denuded,
Swaying and bending in the uncaring wind,
None will come to possess,
For the season shall be passed.
And none shall have given to her
So intimately
As I have given to my lover -
In abandonment.
*
This armor shall protect her
Against us,
But it shall become her prison,
Her most intimate tomb.