letters to _____ – vii

in the fading hours
when light rolls
thin as skin
into the deepening blue
of shared night
I am as alive with you
in this dark
as the night insects
who wake to vibrate
each leaf into being
even by the stars
you remain sun-dipped
and redolent of day’s heat
I would have you tight held
and as wanting as I
exchanging breath
for pulse and tendons
taut with expectancy
for the benediction
of pressed palms
and the song I become
beneath your fingers
all questions of want
addressed by lines of proof
laid down by mouth
to shadowed curve
but more than all
I would have
the quiet best of you
close carried as the self’s
most secret pleasures
sealed safe
in hallowed certainty
beneath exalted night

© Sarah Whiteley

letters to _____ – vi

you should hear then
how I would want
these last words
to be let loose
like jewel-green beetles
to race the hastening day
to scatter scuttling
this final evidence
to your distant ears
love, I rise asunder
each day that wakes
upon your absence
though I am ever
there beside you
for I cannot pull
your breath from mine
nor my love
from the hands
that rightly hold it

© Sarah Whiteley

letters to _____ – iv

I am unallayed
in a hundred little ways
like pins they prick
chasing paths after pulses
in our white-capped bay
these peaks of sheets
and tides of turning limbs
need breathes silent
silver where the gleam of me
flickers at your throat
pressing petals
into fiercest buds of want
I would drift in kisses
and seething shine
orbital to your touch
here you are illimitable
here, my fire, you are mine

© Sarah Whiteley

letters to _____ – ii

in these leaves
we are writ
in the golden greens
of breathing springs
and in softened hues
of fading fires
I will hold you as
memory in winter
and not feel cold
come creeping
I will keep you as
kisses in summer
and in sprouting drown
but once a year
and always
in your earth

© Sarah Whiteley

letters to _____ – i

I do not love you
in that way some have
of losing themselves
until there is no
retrieval of self
know instead I love you
in the way geese gather
and rise gray unto gray
their cries of high, high, high
that into silence fade
I love you in the way
that they in leaving feel
what has been left behind

© Sarah Whiteley