The intimacy of all intimacies
a woman will grant you is to be
inside her, and that will be in truth
everything you think you want,

and about that you will be both right and wrong,
such an everything being like every other
everything a symbol, which is to say a truth
like all truths a tenuous, insubstantial thing,

since once inside you cannot stay,
can leave behind at best only a memento,
as you yourself once were, the product
of a brief visitation, the sort of visitation

you will dream of still, yearn for, contrive
ways to accomplish, including pleading,
wheedling, romancing, dancing, drink,
lies, affectations, affections, hopes.

And now and then it will dawn on you
that the only part of you that arrives
reliably, or less so, in that  presumed paradise
truly is the luckiest part of you, a dumb, 

ungovernable appendage
you wear like a goddamn badge,
a meaty slug hardly distinguishable
from any other.  And though

you can taste her everywhere everywhere
you go, though you've breathed her
breath and pounded over years miles of happy
rigidity into her, depositing in the process a ton
								
of salt manufacture, there you are alone again,
knowing almost nothing of her metaphorical heart
and nothing at all of her soul, half convinced 
you must not have one yourself, for if you did

wouldn't this access be the answer to something?
Wouldn't a lock admitting a key
open the door to a place beyond any gates
of pearl and bone, an escape hatch you will 

by the time you finally die have spent a decade
kneeling in prayer for and to, this body of mercy
and individuality who has—how could it be otherwise?—
no answers, and even less a way into you.

Back to Induration  ||  Next: Gape