What Can You Say About a Shoulder?

I've closed the shades
so the neighbors can't see
the way I move
and stretch these days
to open the heart
to a universe longing
for the promise of love.

We all sit on our porches
on hot summer days
fanning flies and the heat
from our faces
remembering a time of youth
where we dripped with the sweat
of our lover and could drink
each drop with our lips
parched with a bottomless hunger
for one more kiss,
one more caress of a shoulder
or the hand brushing the field
of love that surrounds each of us
with so much light.

But what can you say about a shoulder tonight
alone tuning herself with the spinning
top of the universe –
one collar bone connected to the fleshy
white arm of a woman
waiting to understand
the meaning of the rumbling
of the stars in her chest.

Would you embrace her
in the cold of winter,
warm her enough to stop
the constant humming in her head
long enough to hear herself think
from the center of everything
she is coming to know.

All that peace might be possible
if you could sing a song to this corner
of the bony cage near this beaten
heart and learn to wait on the edge of alone
while holding the cool repose
of a shrug or the shaking
ease of laughter
caught at a moment
of forgetting.