Wind

Drag on shoulders and back as you heave this huge muscle
coming apart in your hands, spilling away from you,
rush it out among leaves in flux, colliding whispers.
One hoist clumps it over the tightrope: a humped shape
flapping absurdist wings. Next, the pull into smoothness
as tears roll down arm-veins, fuse skin and wool.
Damp gathers in vortex of navel, the belly moulded,
like breasts and limbs, by an erotic shroud.
You unclasp it to a straight fall, remove the template,
but again and again the wind rehearses those shapes,
invents variations, or erases the body's planes
to conjure ghosts behind curtains, unhuman masks.
Your hair a cubist halo, clothes harlequined by water,
you peg the sheet that knows your impress so well,
has held the sweat of your dreams. It releases into,
now a wildness, now a sedate swaying, forked by
sleep-creases…Half-sighs, an austere rustling:
this impersonal fabric has its voices, too.
They tell you to live with your hands on the world,
to wring and uncoil its bundled knots. Your body itself
is a subtle knot silhouetted by pure air, its heat
transfiguring cool envelopes you enter, white planes
blankly receiving imprint, a few trace elements,
till whisked away to be drowned then resurrected:
a sail for the winds of heaven to rest against,
curved as cheek or hollow of palm; resisting
and surrendering; teased to life by the merest touch.