Love as an electro-chemical event

When you lift my thighs onto your hips
we are a form as old as the gingko tree,
our silhouette unlikely but inevitable.
Your hands are a mother's on my skin, your words
seashells I will keep on a windowsill
with fragile purple urchins
that float to one small bay
where I have seen stingrays mate.
I breathe a name into your ear
and trace its passage through the forge
of hammer, anvil, stirrup
and the electro-chemical fires
which give it meaning. The skin
over your breastbone feels as fine-grained as feldspar;
my ring finger is a plessor
rapping out percussion, fast, like your heartbeat.
Names don't matter, you say,
and in that moment it is true.
This is an hour stolen from a time of possibility,
a re-enactment of personal history;
it is part fact, part fiction,
for truth is as elusive as the engram
which commits our minds to memory.

Due for publication in Extraction of Arrows, University of Queensland Press in September 2003.

© Kathryn Lomer