The Cleopatra Poems
If it be love indeed, tell me how much
(Antony and Cleopatra, I, i)
sex | pearls | river
games | siren | gifts
sex
I'd be a boy for you
white hips plunging against yours
my wet sap filling your veins
I'd feed you lolling grapes
let you taste the sweetness of mine
lower their dangling cluster to your mouth
My tongue would shower trails of comet dust
your eyes would be the blue shoot of stars
together we would hurtle into the hot breath of space
pearls
see this small pearl
balancing
glistening
rolling to roundness on a grass spear
let me swallow it
feel the cool slip of it arcing in my throat
breaking the drought
river games
I'll offer you this breast
take its pebble-paleness
and place it against your lips
feel its frailty
its river-worn whiteness
give it the cool water of your mouth
let it sink to the centre
let it drown in the waving fronds of your throat
siren
at the heart of you there's pale ambergris
this sticky substance
pooling on my skin
fashion it into the glint of jewels
to wink at my throat
to bead my hips
wrap it round me like ropes of sea-wrack
let it glow pale and golden
against the amber of my skin
gifts
I'd give you Egypt
this brown and green land
stretching undulating
can't you see? the Nile is in flood
it is bursting raining churning
oh how my body burns
this hot pulse
this fevered skin
the land is drying up
sweltering under icy sun
let me give you Egypt
it lies here wrapped in cool sheets
come
enter Egypt
take what is yours
---
From Agamemnon's Poppies, Black Pepper, 2003. (First
published in Island)
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