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EXPLANATION

God knows it has been centuries Since I last heard The keen, ecstatic trumpet of your voice. Ages since I last knew The wistful softness of your mouth on mine. (Ah God! Warm mouths that clung and searched!) Your poised triumphant fingertips That traced erotic ecstacies Through the heater amber hollows ... Curious that time. The stately cadence of the days and hours and centuries. Should be so wholly you - Days that moved in an avalanche Of crashing, colorful emotion Have become rhythmic, pendulemated Grey hammers on my soul. Hours once etched With the gold tracery of your laughter Are pallid indecencies That cling and will not go. All things are dead now you have gone. The lean cats of squalor Run patterns beneath my feet. It is not just that I Who have lived emotion Should have it stifled By the slim white hands I so adore And cannot forget. Better the agonies Of your swift, dear fingertips Playing raptly, certainly On the raw nerve keys of my soul Than - nothing. Have you forgotten - Have your forgotten - The body's heat beneath the palm. The mouth that kissed Each cool, delightful fingertip The while they traced Each tear and tear and sun and You-cut wrinkle On the face beneath - Have you forgotten Write here an epitaph! He diced the Fates And, having lost He could not laugh But took his heart, annealed Through close association with a dream. And broke it. And watched the thin, scincillating scarlet dust Float slowly down Beneath one inch of pine Beneath a cotton flag He lies alone, The mad, tired mind at rest Of the strident bugle Echoed the laughter of those With whom he diced.