PENELOPE OAK

The frame is a configured
gnomic slant of buffed sequoia
Intractable moving only
With the gravitational
Pulse of each season
Headboard, rich alder
Fresco of Aphrodite
sensually licking
An Arrowed quill
Spilled by her lover
en route to pose
pensively for Raphael

The mantle rooted deep
in the earth of your thighs
Swallowed in the soil
of some forgotten vow
Four poster sentinel
Pillars boughs aching
Tester canopy Rich
bark of cherry wood
Sealed with the lid of a cedar tester
Availing Thick curtains dripping
Bangs of the angel who bit
Your neck
When she came
into your forehead

When she came inside you

The mattress is the pond in Wisconsin
Where you can still taste the clean
Smell of your father’s chest
The summer he taught
you how to swim
when you were four

There are Pillows
quilted foliage
Combed from the perfect autumn
Hayrack rides and homecoming bonfires
The wetness of her body
AS she wore your varsity letter jacket
when lips fell inside her mouth in the rain

And a blanket
The tongue of the sun
Bristling over steeples of evergreen


And how now, looking at
The beauty of this bedroom set
Having spent the last twenty years
Just to get back to this
Arboretum of the chest thinking

That this stump of earth
Was somehow worth
The sylvan breath
Alphabetical silhouettes
our bodies make
One botanical plant
Sweat and limbs
unmoved sprouting up
from the tectonic
floorboards of the planet
Releasing itself in an halo-shaped ozone
Generating oxygen
Not moving, in the slightest,
for the next two thousand years

With you on top of me