Nice to Meet You

for Hsing Hui

A thing as delicious as turning the last sound I heard
into a word it cannot be or calling your hidden wish
out into the broad space of the public to make you touch
me instead of asking that I go naked, a thing as delicious
as any of that would not be as safe as a dumb silence.

I am resting my back with a cushion against the chair,
sitting inside the ache when I soaked myself in a balm
the way women went to the river and held things down
until they were as wet as Jesus hanging in the rain,
his pain the invocation of roars destroying the temple.

The things I know are not the things you wish to know,
or they are and I cannot give them to you until I see
what you think of contracts, of what binds the mornings
to unkind sunlight, what takes a hawk and lets it know
there are things less grand than flying, things that crave.