When I Close My Eyes (rev)

When I close my eyes
I cannot reconstruct your face
but a three-dimensional solidity of you
bursts from the tissues of my skin,
enhanced by tactile energies.

I have catalogued
a lifetime of sensation with these fingers
but the smell and taste and sound
of our moment together lingers
forever in my cellular chemistry,
bound by images which tantalize,
spiced in a mosaic of memories.

I close my eyes and build
beneath my hands your waist
with gentle curves that cup and cleave
and taste electricity, recreate
the smoothness of your unmarked breasts
and tight, close-crowned aureole,
the turgid tips where nipples
culminate, and glide my mind's palette
to plumb your flat, unfallowed abdomen.

There was no time in those wondrous hours
to dwell on how recently we'd met,
or to note our lusty appetites
devoured the modest creatures
of our outer selves; when we fell
out of the tangled web of clothes,
aroused by sympathetic passion
and discovery, tumbled in
a naked cliché to the bed,
time stood still forever.

In a labial dawn I savoured
salty draughts of liquor springing
from your tumid lips, luxuriated in a
magnanimity your primal crouch
expressed, heard half-suppressed
love-cries tell the tumult in your loins.

I close my eyes; I cannot see your face,
yet I feel the closeness of your lips and kiss
the shadows of your eyes –
knowing you are there.
© 1980 I.D. Carswell