by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: June 28, 2008

WASH

The panties on the line are bikini,
faded violet, cotton crotch.
The jeans pinned next to them are heavy,
denim opaque, stitching orange.
The breeze yawns, stretches the panties,
hips pressed forward, buttocks tight.
The jeans' legs flail, running jagged laps.
Suddenly the left leg braces across
the open violet space,
the wind suddenly connective -
and they rise and fall on
the taut, now slack, line
in respiring decorum, threaded knowing.
And just as suddenly they unlock,
each having some spoor of union
in their drying separated fabrics.
By morning they've been taken in;
only the thin line remains.

Such breezes blow all the time -
the trick is position and emptiness:
a heart for dice,
a head bruised free of logic,
a body unreeved and bellying.
Always now I carry raised
a wet finger angling for signs,
trying to get out of the lee of things,
pick up the trades, feel my ligaments strain
as the world fills, moves out and on.
To catch that brief coiling, that sperm moment,
skin inside and blood scattered like pollen,
when what is crazed turns seamless.

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