honeyed, when bared

an erotic fragment poem

Photo by Wyxina Tresse on Unsplash

curl shells
trace-white [       ],
embodied 

melt
wet

the storm 
does not hesitate 
to
break

its thunder 

barbed
] rainsoft
   ] sharp

inside
soaks 
  my goldenflower crown

her mouth 
on me

robed
tongues

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Author's Note:

I wrote this fragment poem as the sky grew dark and I felt moved, 
as storms do, to envelop and overtake 
the heat, the trees, the static,
taste the electricity in the air as the atmosphere 
grows thick with the waiting for a thing to penetrate, to erupt;
which is a marked feeling —
though fleeting, often unnamed. 

I wished to explore what poetry can do when bared,
 how it can inhabit, penetrate, impregnate 
a particular place in the psyche, 
in the phantom body,
by way of what is offered, 
and what is withheld. 

White space, erasure, absence —
whether torn into the page by the unpredictable
corrosion of time, 
or deliberately carved into the marbled presence, 
with tools, with intention, precision —
nonetheless speaks.

In the vast openness, the figure of a second poem emerges from within the first (or vice versa).

An echo in the emptiness which illuminates its features. 
A work and its resonance with itself.

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This poem — its form and its delicate eroticism — was inspired by Fragments of Sappho, as translated by Anne Carson (If Not, Winter, 2002). 
Highly recommend, for the sincere poetry devotee; the exquisitely rare poetry lover who wants nothing more than to worship at the altar of a single word. 
Agonize over its beauty; be ecstatic for its singular existence. 
Let it burn in the mind for days. And perhaps in the soul forever.

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