Thirty Days

(It's a friggin' sestina, y'all.)

"Some men say an army of ships
is the most beautiful thing on the black earth,"*
but in this interminable lake of a month,
your lap is the beauty I want, the loose
and sparsely haired skin that coats your thighs,
the wrinkled unsuspecting ease of you asleep.

At the bottom of the teapot honey drowns, asleep,
an inch deep, thicker beneath the tea than sunken ships,
and I grip a mug between my denimed thighs
just tight enough to burn. You burn me,^ so the earth
piles in a ring around my digging hands, mealy, loose,
until they reach dirt cool enough to soothe the scorch. Only a month.

In the thirty steaming mugs that have measured out this month,
porous bits of citrus peel boil themselves asleep
amongst the cloves, and I find a loose
beauty that rivals armies of ships
in the wet pale rings they ghost onto my tabletops; black earth
pocks the scratched backs of my caffeinated thighs.

There is a beauty coarse and mensual in thighs,
the press and sponge of them from month to month,
the way they bleach through winter and bruise black as earth
when bounced around sandboxes. Yours splayed when asleep,
spreading sheets between them wide as water between harbored ships.
Lying beside their dark bulk, I liked to let my thoughts go loose.

Loosely I bury my toes in the damp chill dirt, loose
beneath the carbon, loose in the shelter of grubs. My thighs
ache a little in their muscled stillness, hovering like ships
above the holes that dot this plot of earth, the slow work of a month.
Something in me begins to fall asleep,
going limp and lax in the hollow earth.

Each of these thirty days I have waited for a little earth,
a mooring that with its murky permanence will set me loose
from the tidal pull of your lap, the perfect crescent you form asleep,
the ever-open invitation of your thighs.
With an abundance of tea and dirt I've stained the wake of this month
a putrid gold, and dreamt of submerged ships.

I'm asleep. The earth
sets our ships in teacups, loose,
drowning thighs and month.








*Sappho, Fragment 16
^Sappho, Fragment 38