Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE, by KAREN SWENSON


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: My mouth salty with the taste of your flesh
Last Line: Across the sparrow's waking.
Subject(s): Love; Sex


My mouth salty with the taste of your flesh,
we lie tangled - sand and sea wrack.
Your arms the color
of my mother's cocoa,
of April earth
fresh under the harrow,
of all the bark of all the trees
I have loved
stark under a winter sun.
In this half-light of love
my flesh is a pale shadow of yours,
as though night cast a moon ghost -
paper origami patterns of thighs and knees -
my skin a moth wing of your dusk.

But the stain of us
on the inside of my thigh
is colorless -
an egg-white etch
or the glue children use to cement model airplanes,
make-believes of wings and bombs.
Quiet as light you lie upon my thigh,
a Sesame of all the seeds
we will not give the sun
drying to a puckering scab.
And as dawn dissolves our half-light
back to the definition of black-and-white
our mouths meet once more
across the sparrow's waking.





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