If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you
for the rest of your life,
a night like no other.
You won't see it coming.
Forget the day, the year.
It will arrive uninvoked,
an astrological anomaly.
You will remember
how every cell in your body
knew him, this stranger,
how you held your breath,
the way you searched his face.
This is how such evenings begin.
And you will be real in your skin,
bone and sinew; the way you always thought
you could be. Effortlessly.
This is how you will fit together.
His parted lips between your thighs,
your half-lit nipples darkening,
the hot-breathed arrival of desire,
the frenzied coupling
as you opened soundlessly
and the world flooded into you.
In the morning, maybe,
soon after sunrise
you will walk barefoot above a waterfall in the forest,
light-headed with the smell of sex,
laughing in your déshabillée.
You will carry
the music of this memory with you;
and from time to time,
in the small, withered hours,
your body will sing its remembering.
© Michelle McGrane
From A Suitable Girl, published by Pindrop Press 2010
you will carry one night with you
for the rest of your life,
a night like no other.
You won't see it coming.
Forget the day, the year.
It will arrive uninvoked,
an astrological anomaly.
You will remember
how every cell in your body
knew him, this stranger,
how you held your breath,
the way you searched his face.
This is how such evenings begin.
And you will be real in your skin,
bone and sinew; the way you always thought
you could be. Effortlessly.
This is how you will fit together.
His parted lips between your thighs,
your half-lit nipples darkening,
the hot-breathed arrival of desire,
the frenzied coupling
as you opened soundlessly
and the world flooded into you.
In the morning, maybe,
soon after sunrise
you will walk barefoot above a waterfall in the forest,
light-headed with the smell of sex,
laughing in your déshabillée.
You will carry
the music of this memory with you;
and from time to time,
in the small, withered hours,
your body will sing its remembering.
© Michelle McGrane
From A Suitable Girl, published by Pindrop Press 2010
