It went like this, your mouth covered mine like soil covers a root but relies on ruse and not the turn from soil to rock and back again, until it is velvet, until it feeds. I use my fingers to dig where the wood turns spongy, my body before it was a body, braincomb, the soft sunder of girl’s hair, coaxed from it a language of bruised petal, rock that lodges in the shoe or the heart. We were strangers to each other except for the poem about the rock making shadow from desire, animal stirring under the evening’s confluent rust. It was a poem we wrote in spite of each other, wrote when we were children and staining our knees with it, holding it in our pockets like mica or plundered quarters. The excess of each other’s bodies was some field you stripped in to find your shadow naked but clung to trees, clung to birds like mites on the feather’s sweet oil, song of my body you writhe against to rise, covered in hunger, but still you rise, hunger only bone-field to a body you refuse but for the dance you cannot stop your response to, neither participant willing to move, but standing so close the movement becomes petal you place under your tongue as a stand in for language, you rise, dressed in my body now to dance the poem of your making as if it was not shame, as if we did not disentangle our nights from each other so each could blossom separately, no longer heady, so they could sweeten inconsolably, comfort, as poems do, that do not move together like a soliloquy of verbs but burn.