Always in Love the First Time

A letter in her hand arrived in the mail
this morning, a critic of my wife poem

I said, Hello, Satan, pull up a chair
She's low as Jesus on a pallet by her

bed, my crimes have been logged in love &
sincerity. Leaves of paper fall to the

floor. My fingers are tight in my palm
The invisible curtain rises. I bless her

with silence the way one fixes a lover
at a train station. I holler, Brother, give

me another half pint. I break out in
a sweat. I strip bare like girls in dark

fallen wings, two lovely legs crossed
conceal inviolate darkness in the

window of a white clover heart, a
rift in my bed of jasmine, I a spider’s

belly, a morsel, honeydew in silken ivy