Taking Off My Clothes

I take off my shirt, I show you.

I shaved the hair out under my arms.

I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair

on my legs with a knife, getting white.

My hair is the color of chopped maples.

My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.

(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)

Skin polished as a Ming bowl

showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds

of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.

In the night I come to you and it seems a shame

to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.

You recognize strangers,

think you lived through destruction.

You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?

Your own hands are lying

Carolyn Forché,
from Gathering the Tribes

*

You kiss like a soldier,

you move like a snake,