Love: Beginnings by C.K. Williams

Dear R: It is Sunday night. I’m hungry, I love you, and I’ve been meaning to read this poem to you for the longest time:

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Love: Beginnings
C.K. Williams

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much
     frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity
     and unity they make —
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter
     at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of
     being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
     cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in
     flame into the sexual —
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that fill-
     ing of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again,
     stamping in its stall.

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Remember when I told you how your voice sounds like silk, how your eyes feel like wine, how your touch tastes like the corner of your lips I like to kiss? One day I’ll write you a poem in my mother tongue, and read it to you as you slowly fall into sleep.