Night's grating of steel on stone and splash
of water crashing from the buckets
brings back that moment in a flash;
the night burnt bright in limb's caress
and flesh yielding flesh in passions
blessed by sealed lips.
Abandon bested grace in our pummelled bed
where we found a beauty in a closeness
of our bodies welded hip to hip in cleavage
closer than the clench of life,
possessed each other's fevered soul,
embraced the darkness from us.
Our struggle of gigantic rhythms
found no modest harmony in fellow tunes,
and yet the war of lover's needs
touched mortality within our dreams.
In the light that shrieks from our potency
glares an image of each, perceived and bared
as only climacteric can, unclothe
in fervency of mutual ascent,
the nakedness of man.
The vision in that lucid truth
which quelled our raging passion,
the anguished gasps which quavered
to a warm and glowing balsam
is a thousand choral voices,
all wise men's tongues and wisdom
and a million unwritten poems.
In music of our dying embers chorus' strong
the cry of sanity returning,
unenchanted in our selfish song.
Subdued and silenced, limpness of a sighed
caress of movement, gentle, tender, and we part
to lie contused in humid sweetness;
the venom of our vigour cools,
belies our lucid state,
and the eerie bucket's dirge
echoes to the turn of fate,
a shivered jarring on the crumpled sheets,
discerned in coldness of the sea-bed,
dredges consciousness of our return.
© I.D. Carswell
