When I Close My Eyes - Poem by Ivan Donn Carswell

When I close my eyes I cannot reconstruct your face
but the three-dimensional solidity or you
bursts through the tissues of my skin,
transmogrified by a tactile binary fusion.

I have catalogued a lifetime of sensation with these fingers
but the smell and taste and sound of our private moment together
lingers forever in my cellular chemistry, bound
by images which tantalize, spiced in a mosaic of memories.

I close my eyes and build beneath my hands your waist
with gentle curves that cup and cleave
and taste electricity, recreate the smoothness of your unmarked breasts
and tight, close-crowned aureole, the turgid tips where nipples
culminate, and glide my mind's palette to plumb
your flat, unfallowed abdomen.

There was no time in those wondrous hours to dwell
on how recently we'd met, or to note our lusty appetites
devoured the modest creatures of our outer selves;
when we fell out of the tangled web of clothes,
aroused by sympathetic passion and discovery,
and tumbled in a naked cliché to the bed,
time stood forever still.

In the labial dawn
I savoured salty draughts of liquor
springing from your tumid sex,
luxuriated in the magnanimity of your primal crouch,
and heard your half-suppressed love-cries tell the tumult in your loins.

I close my eyes, I cannot see your face,
yet I feel the closeness of your lips and kiss the shadows of your eyes
and know that you are there.
© I.D. Carswell