Freedom Of Love

My wife whose hair is a brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is an incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows

My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs

With steam on the windows

My wife whose shoulders are champagne

Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice

My wife whose wrists are matches

Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts

Whose fingers are fresh-cut hay

My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit

And Midsummer Night

That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails

Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea

And a fusion of wheat and a mill

Whose legs are spindles

In the delicate movements of watches and despair

My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders

Whose feet are carved initials

Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks

My wife whose neck is fine milled barley

Whose throat contains the Valley of God

And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom

My wife whose breasts are of night

And are undersea molehills

And crucibles of rubies

My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses

Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight

Is a giant talon

My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight

With a back of quicksilver

And bright lights

My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and white chalk

And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk

My wife with the thighs of a skiff

That are lustrous and feathered like arrows

Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock

And imperceptible balance

My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax

Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring

My wife with the sex of an iris

A mine and a platypus

With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candles

My wife with the sex of a mirror

My wife with eyes full of tears

With eyes that are purple armor and a magnetized needle

With eyes of savannahs

With eyes full of water to drink in prisons

My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the axe

My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire.