6. Respite
She finds me on the quiet and dark shores
Which with no luminous crown overhead
Lets the fossils in the quarry walls
Remain in their calcified age
Kept from that same verdancy which this body too lacks
Without which I am made a sibling of these fossils
The shore has given up on me and the kneading sea
Reaches towards my stilled form
Prone and exhausted of motion
The tide knows only time stands before its claim.
Her hands find me in each space she assesses
Crawling up my calf and prodding my knee into reflexion
She seeks something I have lost or misplaced
Within these confines her fingers trace a path
Up my thigh and examine my pelvis
She is as rhythmic and measured as I am
Unconsciously firm as always happens and
She laughs and clucks in Thai for she is not Malay
Having been brought here as much for her skill
As the absence of inhibition which compels it.
I am transparent beneath her fingertips.
Her fingers find my collar bone and
Throat still stiff all over with locked nerves
She is tumbling through this labyrinth, me
Her fingers carve through knobs of
Unresolved days along the planes
Of fascia which hold me rigid
My whole body swollen with
Unwilled tumescence ready to be
Unstoppered.
Her fingers sand away unknot muscles
An callused edge of her thumb is her carpenter's plane
Its many decades, many they are
Her gravity at least as present as the lines which score her face
Wisely apportioned as she leans into her strokes
She kneads a driving force as she planes me
Soft and level and smooth as though she knows my contours
She toys with my ears and brow
Her fingers explore my lips and tongue
Finding jumbled combinations which lock me.
She creeps into my cavernous mouth
One digit at a time until like a fish dumb and gaffed
Hooked in her grasp her hands caress my throat
From within and under pressure
An ancient breath forgotten within me bellows out
Her elbows widening my jaw
My eyes flickering as she is
Surgical in her diagnoses
She slips into me completely and I am paralyzed
With another form fully within my own
I am the skin she wears as she unfolds herself
Into my each and every limb and extension.
Her dive into me complete and
She seeps into my marrow
Her fingers dissolves and like
Gossamer filaments flow outward
Infusing intracellular space
Outward from my cells and in sweeping
Brush-fronds like coral feathers she sweeps me out
With gentle pressure she filters my blood with her
Ten thousand feathery implements as she breathes
With me she converses freely as well as those others who
Lie in remnant memory in myriad forgotten spaces
Only she bears witness to those who were once company.
She withdraws slowly from this costume
She makes me breathe through the cramps
Withdrawn she shakes off a magnetic ash
Of inorganic matters caked and flaking off her own skin
No baser denominations than these which from me she takes.
Her fingers probe my pelvis and
She rolls me over limp like a rubber mannequin
Face down flat and folds towels across my hind
She applies oils which glint of starlight upon me
Thighs and all and leans her whole self upon my
Unrepentant joints.
These joints pop and my inner atmosphere gasps
She reads the pressure trapped within my ears
Behind tight ringing eardrums which remember gunfire.
A toe at a time under her pull
And she kneads me at the
Waist and runs rings around
My anus with the pads of her
Thumbs and loosens me slowly
At a wrist's depth I feel her caressing a
Frozen bladder and stoking my liver
Warming it and then kidneys responding
Slowly she untangles my lymph
Its rivers commencing to their tasks
Of hormonal titration once more.
At an elbow’s depth her fingers appear
Pressing outward within my belly
Reseating my sternum next as
Her second arm enters me
And gripping my ribs she pulls
Herself through stirring mucous finally
Wakened and viscous and warming
As her toes disappear within
My ribs are her ladder-rungs
Upwards into me and this tumescence
Is expressed in mechanical orgasm.
She is finished
I am emptied.
She trickles out in drops
Stringed together with a cohesion
Long absent from a disjointed
Narrative to which she has
Restored my faithful articles
And objects and refreshed the
Distinction of my subject
She withdraws and with that adhesive trail
Strings wet glimmering drops like stars
On that diaphanous veil which reminds
Her of her abandoned mythology and origin.
She maps me out plying skin with her palms
She spreads my scrotum between a thumb and forefinger
Reading veins like a fortuneteller
Seeking the cause of my catatonia.
Taking my limp stamen between her lips
She suckles me to stirring
She laughs and clucks and with two hands
Kisses my crown and shares with me in being
Newly rejeweled.