Ode to Your Upper Arms
Which part of your body is my favorite?
You’ll think perhaps the obvious, but no
That power has its own relationship
To me, my hands and my soft openings
What I mean is a part of your body
That quietly contains you. Can you guess?
Your upper arms
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I can imbibe the thighs of running men
Delight myself with sights of defined legs
Powerful and sleek as striving horses
Two columns upholding a mystery
You have such thighs
But what in your deltoids and biceps sets
Me yearning, and what am I searching for?
They’re large and arched, pure beauty in themselves
Like marbled men of Michelangelo
And different from mine in such a way
Your ears or feet or knees could never be
They hold your upper body above me
As you fix on my face and move through me
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We’ve shared a bed for an entire night
Perhaps a dozen times in our six years
Most of those evenings, rung out from laughing
And too wine-drunk and filled with each other
To need to fuck,
We lie supine and wander into sleep
But not before I turn to meet your arm
To smell my breath returning from your skin
Or cup my hands around you as a prayer
Resting my forehead on its granite curve
I drop into a rare stability
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The idea of your arms changes sometimes
When I don’t see you. The picture of you
Swirls with the girl and woman and mother
And lover inside me, and you become
To me a boy
Your skinny arms maneuvering your bike
Or raised to your turned face to catch your tears
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Away from you these days I understand
That the afternoons where I could survey
Your skin are gone
I’ll have to conjure your contours staring
At your shirt across the café table
But in this most recent experiment
Trying to live without you finally
I found myself trapped back in a small space
And from there knew I would be saved: Those arms
Could still hold me
I could load you with my exuberance
Fall angrily on you in my despair
And your friendship, though shy at times, could hold
Me, even if we never touch again