Marriage

I

I am still inside you, still

The sweet after weight of coitus

Holds us in its common gravity

As slowly out of the skin of a single animal

We return each to the other

Out of the wet, the filling, biting, slapping

The snuffling, emptying, crying

We pick delicacies

I trace you

You kiss my eyes

We smell our difference

And mouth by mouth

Weave a cloth of breath between us

With a shuttle of the air.

II

Outside, someone whispers, “Action”

And all the sounds that sex had stilled

Start at this quiet direction

The slow wondering of friends walking

Dogs barking on repeat

The anger of traffic delayed

All slide through the window

Carrying the city to us

As the kind narcosis fades.

The day will dress you now

And you will go into it

Into its muffled choir

You will say later there was no closer thing

Than my body in yours

And how you enjoyed knowing

As no one else could

You had that fucked feeling

Except that friend at work

Who, detecting the suppressed radiance of oxytocin

Mouthed across the desks

“Was it good?”

III

Early us was a huddle of love and lust

Intimate and easy in a touch

Like we’d got some good shit

That made time run slow

Rolled a joint and taken

A long toke of unrushed

Felt the deep pull of love

And its spacey, sleepy, afterglow.

Then, one night when we were playing the

Carnival of the Animals

In a version we’d edited over the years

I realised we were having a threesome

With everyday life

When you said

“Cyprus or Corfu?”

And I replied

“It’s entirely up to you”.