Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

//walt whitman, from "song of myself"

.




In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

//Mark Strand

Someone's ink and needles,
have written skin riddles,
on his body bare before me except for these sketches,
Signal and semaphore,
for things he won't talk about,
quiet and shut about his padlocks and latches,
My fingers trace his pictures and at each his breathe catches,
He says why are you bare,
bare as the day, day you were born, born from your mother,
I say so you can tattoo with the marks of lovers,
The red trails of his fingers,
the bumping palate of his bony hip,
sharp tooth beneath his softest lip,
the kiss obscures the bite,
He sketched his designs on me all through the night,
he finished and was sleeping so i jumped the early flight,
Now a thousand miles away,
with the passing of the days,
your colors fall from my skin like the moon smooths out the waves,
so quietly they left that i didn't see them fade,
I don't need ink and needles,
to write me my excuse,
the body does tattoo itself,
with old age and abuse,
with lines pooled from the inside drawn from pain and revelry,
My body will tattoo herself with what you mean to me.