Tango: Sombra, Lucida

When you wake, your breath lifts from the pillow in small clouds.
            I tell its shape though light has been shut from our room by the blinds.

You know the baked smell of sun upon stone that hides in the roots of my hair.
            But in the darkest room it is I that would find you by scent if I were to go blind.

Water warbles, beguiling on tile. You stand in your skin as if new, outlined.
            I want to throw shutters open to gathering light; so yellow, so carmine it blinds.

Who would not pause as the air holds out garments, pleats nearly invisible sleeves?
            So lightly worlds rest, remote archipelagoes of dust; how isolate, how blind.

Intimate as language exchanged in the dark, our faults flare and spiral,
            struck from the same flint. At the end of our street the alley is blind.

Where’s that hammock, that shadowy intersection, the moon of your thighs?
            Your love of the dark is cloth woven by touch, a message in code to read blind.

Where do you go when you leave? I work by my window all day, desiring expanse,
            desiring the plainness of light. But even alone, the other is close: blind

shadow that trails at one’s heels, that rises when the other rises, that turns when each
            turns; that patterns each gesture after the other’s—as if to herself now blind.