Aphelion
At the farthest point from having her, the orbit swings me wide,
and I am lying in the aphelion with nothing left to hide —
the body tells its truth at three a.m.,
unvarnished, raw, and blunt,
and every truth tonight is just a variation of I want.
The sheets are a topography of restlessness and heat,
kicked and bunched and rearranged around my tangled feet,
and the room is thick with phantom traces of the way she moved
through the doorway hours ago — unhurried, unimproved
by anything but gravity and skin and the voluptuous
arrangement of her body in the light, conspicuous
and devastating — elbow, hip, the turn of ankle, wrist —
and I am lying here compiling everything I’ve missed.
The distance is the cruelty. She’s fifteen minutes east
and sleeping without consequence while I attend the feast
of memory — the rapacious, concupiscent buffet
of every time she’s bent or stretched or simply walked away
and left me with the afterimage burning on the eye,
libidinous and furious and far too wired to try
for sleep, for calm, for anything resembling a truce
with the body’s blunt insistence that there isn’t any use
in pretending this is manageable, that the dark won’t win,
that the febrile three a.m. won’t strip me to the skin
and leave me here, tumescent, in the gravity well of lust,
rehearsing every contour like the faithful and the just
attend their prayers — except my devotion’s horizontal,
sweat-soaked, aching, monumental,
a full-body genuflection to the insatiable pull
of a woman sleeping fifteen minutes east, content and full
of dreams that don’t include the wreckage she has left behind
in this bed, in this body, in this incandescent mind
that will not stop projecting her against the bedroom wall —
the curve, the weight,
the warmth of her — until the morning’s call
drags me, ruined, into light, still orbiting the place
where wanting peaks at aphelion, her body filling space
I cannot close, cannot collapse, cannot accelerate through —
just the languorous, voluptuous, and devastating view
from the farthest point of having, where the wanting is the most,
and I am three a.m.’s most faithful, most devoted host.