VI

Your body, infinite,
is a mist in the perspiring dawn.
The dried up night still clings to your thighs,
a wasteland of sheets,
a torpid blood of completed lust.
The body scraped to the raw hour
leaves only a sun without longing.
A violence of incense
still revolves on the desolation of your chest.
But desolation has failed me,
language and night and the warmth of grass
have failed me,
and bodies are towers of burning mandolins.