Have I Told You

By Ricki Mandeville

that your mouth is raw sugar
at my throat, that your words
tickle the silence from the room
like a whirring
from the wingtips of birds
that your rare alchemy
confounds the law,
makes everything probable,
that I float to you
with the easy levitation
I master in dreams
that in your arms I am
a sable shell smoothed
in the tumble of tides
hollow & waiting to be filled
have I revealed
(I would have said this
in a small voice close to your ear)
that a deep drawer inside my chest
has slid open beneath your hands
and that no one has ever
lifted my hips with such grace
blanching the outer darkness
with light from inside my bones?