(This will be the last of several posts of old old OLD poems!!  I marvel at the changes, the reductions and growths, the increases and diminishments, and always that distant empty place in the poems that is no longer there in what I write…sooo strange to me, these words so familiar and yet as if written by a stranger.  And so I was…a stranger.)

the river in its abundance
all about us, as we stood
on a warm rock to wash

slowly
smoothing with long
sliding strokes

our soapy hands along each other’s
slippery cool bodies

quiet and slow in the midst of
the quick of the
sounding river
Our hands were flames
stealing upon quickened flesh until

no part of us
but was
sleek and
on fire