Carbon Copies

The horizon lassos your tender hips,
encircles the rueful V of protuberant
bone blossoming from the
calyx of your jeans.

And we constellate, scattering

freckles that sprawl haphazard
across your sketchpad limbs, and
then the moon pinions your wan wrists

and, with one protracted digit,
tattoos its opalescing fingerprint
between your nose and lips.

Indents. Stays.

Fabric clings in lazy beams shimmering
along the virile pottery of your torso

the shirt’s hasty decoupage succumbs
to the encroaching water.

It creeps; festers and gurgles

a weary tarantella, lurching to marinate
my sinewing calves and thighs.

And your pallor is luminous. It’s
better than the winded-breath mauve
that once bloomed in the same cheek.
The thirst, the thirst,

the thirst, you slur through
the maracas of gritted fillings, the thirst

is for the heft of body and the
languid arc of moisture through your cells;
transient as the dilated moment
when you inhaled the nape of my neck.

Can the impermanence of the physical
ever be transcended
like the imprint

of your shifting body, that promised
my gullible sheets that it will fossilize;

or is it like any vestige of bygone days

the carbon copies of wayward lovers
whose skin we once traversed.