Love arrived like sunstroke.
Though when we met, at water’s edge,
amidst a crowd of suncreamed kids
who kicked the surf,
it was too early then, by far.
I thought your eyes
the only handsome thing about you:
generous and blue; expressive
as your hands, which, gesturing, did not hide
the ring that braced your finger.
Beach-tired, half-drunk and wordless
I did not ask, or think to.
At dusk, I led you to my room.
We held each other carefully,
our kisses delicate and flawed.
Your tongue crept around my neck, as if
unsure of what business it had there.
But when it found the coast
of sunburn on my shoulder,
and ran along the crest
where skin had peeled,
it grew confident, trailed down.
I exhaled in almost silence.
Outside, a lonely beachfront laugh;
a motorino, thin and distant
and waves hushing them to hear us better.
How close we were to them. How far.
You stripped me, and your fingers
wrote something beautiful,
without words, without letters,
in the small of my back.
Lower still, your hands
worked like rhymes, the way
your touches arrived, and ended
as I’d hoped they would.
You said something I did not understand
Yet understood
And I spoke back in deadened gasps.
You separated my legs like pages
And entered me with a noise that made us laugh,
as if I’d known you longer.
You slid into me and over me; the force
of a hundred arrows bound together.
In time – too soon –
in rolling tides, I came.
Afterwards, you stayed. I lay
and watched your dreaming head,
its awkward nose, your lips.
I was not in love with you. Not yet.
But sometime in the sombre dawn
your leg twitched wildly as you slept.
And still awake and warm, I wondered if,
unconscious, you had thought to run
across the waves to me.
