Green like Esmerelda

Women put up their hair and on their stern faces
To catch their mates at the scene of a crime
They created in their own minds
With hearts bursting with love
And fears large as the distance between them.
The muscles still ripple beneath the skin-tight shirt,
The strut still counters the booty shake,
Or so the earth still confirms as true,
Like it says her blue eyes still beguile the moon
From the sky.
                         But all that is unacknowledged
In their dance, the trading off of silence
Of couples games that seem so deadly
But are only play.

If I was a poet
                           I would get some kind of award
For the most times married, still it's the lovers
I reflect on, how I stayed in their corner rooms
For the poignancy of conversations in front of
Old televisions, with their mothers' serving spoons
As the buzzards circled the rooftops.
It always ended the same, they all died poor and lonely
After leaving me, and though I liked to wallow
In the pathos, I always found some misplaced stone
Who gave forever in the touch again,
Who went through every pore
And lived in every atom
Until there was no notion of a separate me anymore,
A kind of passion that can only come
From the deepest part of the stars.
Always the same woman,
Always all women,
The deeper they revealed their soul the more true that was,
So it was easy to be true -- for me at least
If never quite for her -- I can only follow,
Say "yes" to her resolute "no",
Give her emotion some legitimacy,
As if I have no skin,
As if it wasn't a game,
As if everything I say
Isn't her.

As we sit in the outdoor cafe,
Black tiles gleaming like a crossroads
Of nostalgia and longing,
She still all of them: this one's laugh, that one's
Sudden glee, another's snide response,
But it is still as distant as it always was,
An inexplicable eruption of grace, annoyance,
Savagery, pleasure, sweetness, calm, wisdom ...
From some place I cannot go
No matter how tightly I grip her hand.
Words pass but immediately dissolve,
Energy merges but at the service of a capricious puppeteer,
Looks say what they mean but the mood keeps changing
Like the lights of the day on a quest beyond our meanings.
It seems as if our positions will be stone
Left to weather the elements alone,
But then a blue sarong comes along to remind me
Of what each put aside for the other,
The space we've held for a never quite revealed mystery;
Bought from a beach peddler it becomes the rug
That ties the room together, all dissonance and distance
Falls away, into the radiance of a body
Moving like the surf toward me.