I walked with my traveler
and thought of the other women before me.
Probably they’d looked at those very same grasses together,
hairgrass, foxtail, barley, who
cares, so what if they had;
willows dropped their blonde eyebrows.
In childhood, I had this map called Canaan
at the Time of Conquest.
That was before I knew the Kennedys did it,
before any sex at all.
Minuscule names of tribes slanting
into each other,
the mouth-wrinkles smiling around the Dead Sea;
the thought of all those boys and women
with cloth and the long hair and the many directions,
striped tents,
the vast fluttering, the whisper
of airy things being lifted off, the warm
dry mouths of strangers being kissed;
sex stays fairly secret
for a long time, doesn’t it. That map
had pale yellow skin,—like many of my wrists—