I know your nakedness.

I know your feet:
sheep-milk-pale and fine-tuned,
the catgut of tendons tightened
to the lautari's jagged pitch.
And I know your legs:
small, muscular, the calves
bulging like firm roadside roots, and,
oh! the tapered elegance of thighs
tensing at the knee,
poised and balanced on the bone-
a lantern-flame balanced at the smoking wick.

I know those fine buttocks:
hard and tight-sprung as melons,
weighty in the steam of bison-grass.
And I know those loins- oh! nomad mystery!
a dark and unmapped country,
a wilderness of pathways and disappearances,
of marsh and sump, of steppe and rubble.

I can conjure up that sweet belly that makes me swoon
with hot and moony tenderness;
and that navel, like a pagan well, with its scuffed track
leading south.
And that shaded hollow at the sternum-
Don't say I don't know it...
I know its perfect depression,
where it nestles above your ransacked ribs;
and I know those mushroom-blushed nipples,
and their swirls of poignant straw.
And that sun-starved breast leading upward
to the gleaming throat that I glimpse- bare, exposed-
like a windswept isthmus,
salt-sprayed by the waves.
Oh! I know them all- all the lonely highlands,
the beckoning plains, the endearing gullies
of that inaccessible continent.

I picture all the places,
constructing them piece-by-piece,
like an exile trying to keep alive
the memory of a field,
and a hillside,
and a swing hanging from a sky, and
the face of a girl,
freckled, singing for her lover,
and a sad barrenness, an emptiness,
and a white flower.