Red Wine
Praying in genes of holy wonder, listening to the popping sky, behold you in slender moments, kissing your hair and brushing it aside, you with the white skin glove, a treasure of homeless beauty, drinking a bounty of warm vintage, collecting the time between memory and the stain of drunken glory, human pride so wasted by the black eyes of furtive reflection, Come and give me your skin, taste the salty brine of your forehead, tears touching your eyes, I say toast to the coming dawn, entrench yourself in the lazy mirror but see for an eye for an eye, the logic of swimming nape and neck so smooth, lingering like an eyeless angel spending her froth on a brand new day, seeing and giving the bright bottom of the glass, red and tasteful, in the fever of the night where we play like animals with our shadows rising to the ceiling, comfortable wounds walk inside our throats, teasing the truth with sharp eyes, listening to music one the blood red bench, where pianos move all by themselves like satin fingers full of ghosts and muscular joints, this season of doubt, the black and red brilliance of a shy sky filled with hunger, here light my cigarette and kiss me forever, O' how it comes without respite, and endless famine that is filled with hungry lips, the closure of a thousand different memories, the sad portrayal of one lingering eye spell-broken by the default of time, pressed together like silver spoons in a drawer, listening to the seagulls fly above us, where the spent light is saved for later, like a pocket full of miracles and the shapely bread where our hands meet in good times to come.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray