Tart Honey. Deborah Burnham

we stretch our hands into the moonlight,

      hoping to see blue.

      2. Our Hands

      My hands, your hands, assume the color

      of each other’s bodies in the streetlight’s

      acrid gold. At dawn, our skins are simplified

      to blue, so pure, so softly curved you’d think

      that we could stretch into the dancer’s lean

      blue shapes, love softening our querulous

      aging flesh. You stroke my back where I cannot

      reach, so gently I wonder if the touch

      is yours, or the pure blue light.

      Peaches

      1.

      Peaches on a blue plate, on blue linen,

      ripening as slowly as the sun

      fades into night. Sometimes wind will make them

      fall so softly that they lie unbruised

      among the rough grass, the knobby roots.

      I’d like to cut ripe peaches for you,

      lay one bright crescent, then another

      on your tongue so you could squeeze the juice

      around your mouth, then kiss me.

      2.

      The sage who counseled “Live in the exact

      center of each moment” must have had one

      ripe peach in mind, in hand, his mouth

      dry from trying to say “no” so gently

      to Desire, in late August when the lightest

      touch on rosemary or basil sends sharp

      perfume into the air like smoke, so willing

      to diffuse itself into the dry heat.

      On waking every hour

      Trickster moonlight spreads like ice

      across the leaves, leaving my

      bewildered skin to wonder how

      to sleep when the moon swells

      to a ball of ice, then melts,

      pouring light that behaves like water

      on piping birds, vines knotted at

      our window, and your exhausted arms.

      Leaves, skin, and the fields beyond us

      dip and coil in the moon’s glaze that

      settles, thick as the iced river, on our bed.

      We shift and whisper into sleep;

      I count your breaths while the wet moon

      spills itself on sleeping birds,

      startling them into song before my

      shadow unfolds on the loose air of dawn.

      On the gift of a photograph

      Thank you for the picture of November roses,

      unmarked by frost. Thanks for telling me

      about Andre Kertesz, and how in 1915

      he snapped two Polish soldiers on their field latrine,

      and how he kept their dignity clean and useful

      like the straw they clutched.

      One story says that Kertesz sent the photo

      to one soldier’s widow. Not likely—but if he did,

      I bet she thanked him for believing that a man’s

      last printed moment is worth keeping,

      even if his pants are down.

      I’ve stopped editing the awkward moments from our

      life-film—our yawns, snores, belches, silences, leaving

      them intact beside our loving grins, like November