intimate mornings
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 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, 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.
august 12

Mia Moore


"Excellent summer poem." —Kirk