Journeys End

The roaming of your mouth and your hands
has been a map for the wandering of my wits,
a soup for my ill-kneaded alphabet.
Across the atlas of our secrets,
the typefaces give away nothing,
each dot and serif neither conceding
nor concealing the water-softened,
wind-sharpened, wish-distorted stones
that form the base of the fountain
by which fishermen die of thirst,
down the street from the kitchen
where the cook so carefully
conducts with cold-chapped fingers
the fluency of heat to starch and flesh.