Thighs of your Genius

Thighs of your Genius

(for Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach)

I brought your Jewish soul some water
For your literary festivity
We both kneeled by the muse of spiritual words
Our collarbones angled to the skies

We knew the sacrifice and the longing
We were migrants of a different sort
We had travelled with necessity
And ached to find a home somewhere

Beneath the different dialects
The open-ended wounds we had sustained
Getting from one place to another
And sustaining the years where injuries

Were slow to heal, our hearts and lungs
Felt the fear of too much shirting
Our pulse steady as a loving pupil
We felt the silence of a lifetime of breath

In the steady gaze of each other
And then we let go, for all our dreams
Had already existed in the written word
There was only an unlived memory of love

That stuck to the back of our throats
Like medicine for poetry, and dispatched anonymity
Our dance of vocabularies were
Like Piscean windows that met the Eastern symbols
An alchemy of goose bumps and organic teasing.