1
We were fifteen. Summertime.
We walked through the moonlit village
to the cliffs above the beach.
We made love at that trembling pitch
where sensations become emotions,
none of which we’d ever felt before.
Our hearts like torches hurled into the sea.
A magnificence
that cannot survive
the innocence
that makes it possible.
2
No beauty without perishing.
No love without that first desolate moment of heartbreak
when you know something is wrong,
but you don’t know what it is,
or how to stop it.
3
Midnight, the mountains,
we make a bed of our clothes
on the granite slab.
Naked beyond skin,
we lift our palms to the moon,
our bodies trembling like the limb of a tree
a heartbeat after the bird has flown.