It's Not As If

It's Not As If It's not as ¿/"sometimes you're sixteen again: this afternoon's really the first a man's unbuttoned you, lifted, bent and kissed: here, surrounded by blackberries and zinnias. And when you touch me back, it's not like a wave sweeping the tidal pool: everything does swell with power and with nourishment and everything is something else. Love's no mere acquaintance: our hands and lungs invent a language in the voices of whose animals we cry out the long translation of each other's stubborn tongue. You are that pear in the long autumn grass, and when you rise from a bath warm and wet my clothes are a trail of scraps in the folktale forest and everything, everything is metaphor. George Perreault 67 ...