For months he has been reinventing
the room, the burnished oils, the pipe bowl
of dark pot, the infinity quilt,
her two birthday presents silk-wrapped
and staged next to the port on the antique table.
He's impassioned: Long ago, after a weekend
gritted with slant jibes and too much
silence in the car, when the snare of doubt
caught her breath like a mute future,
they pulled hard off the road for dinner
and a cheap room. That night, wordless
in the stale dark, without a kiss,
they let memory roll its hands
over their bodies. The day's pain
fell behind their gathering breath.
A new heat pushed her legs to the bed's reach,
and he followed its path down and down
to its source. He couldn't know
that in a few moments his life would change
forever, the room transformed, another world.
And now, in preparation for her fortieth
birthday, even as he tastes
the last signals of her readiness,
he tries to lead her into the same
lengthening secret of that night.
His thumbs work deep ovals
into the raised strands of her thighs.
She is about to come, and he pauses,
breathes lightly out over her stomach,
which begins to lower, her back settling
from its arch. His own desire
was to know her rising as she had
years ago into the motel air and then stayed
and stayed there as he kept giving
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the lubricious gift to her, how
way off, beyond her stomach and breasts,
her call began, no, not a call, but
a high thin weeping, which over
that longest time lowered into a sad,
sung cadence of ecstatic breathing, and
continued, her arms limp, her palms
turned up and lax, her face leaned aside,
a tear-trace streaming to the pillow,
and still he tendered the same, slow
tidal pace, the room atomized
around them, her new life pouring on
and on into him. And so, finally, here
in this long-reserved, perfected room,
he bends down to her again and she lifts
into the altitudes of the rural
afternoon light, a percussive tremor
pressing out the windows and soon
another and quick again until laughing
and able to bear no more she pulls him
up into her, her fingers spread
in his hair, and stares into his eyes
as her breath returns. At first he swims
in a slight sadness, past the room's failed
inventions, until he closes his eyes
to take the light coming up from below.
He knows he should be grateful
they're without the old catalyzing pain.
And he recalls the fifth or eighth minute
of her song in that worn room when, apart and
untouched, he came in a sudden, single wave
as indeliberate as her weeping. Now he hears
his name breathing in her voice like a gift,
and, quietly, he lets go.
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