Rapture’s Lack

Why must lust

depend on division?

Why does sex stun

when it’s most unbound?

To be whole, they have always told me,

is the province

of a woman: to be full: fulfilled.

Nothing about fear.

Nothing about the sublime

writhed desire

locked in body and mind,

the incapable aches

roiling sleep—.

What spurs the blood

into simmering

does not love it,

would not suffer one lack

to prevent its being spilled.

What becomes one body

to another

is imagining, not truth. How terribly

this sort of rapture

—covetous, uncluttered—

cleaves us empty.