Message in a Bottle

you send pictures and news,
wear your life like mosquito bites
draped all over your pale skin.

You have new people in your bookshelf,
one dog-eared more than the others.
you have started smoking. I only smile.

We laugh over sex and future plans,
knowing with quiet comfort that it will
or wont happen. You'll wax your cunt anyway

and I will leave my heart open, and point at
the fireflies on the sill, rorschach undies on the floor.
What would you have done, if we kissed that night at Saarang?

for I loved you then, as much as I loved anyone else;
your light-eyed, soft-pawed grace. The way no man could ever mark you.
We both carry tattoos now. Mine are underneath the skin.

You take pictures of the night. The stories in your beaded,
red and silvered pouch sound familiar to me,
like I was there, naked in the forest inside you,
Caiman-staring at your cigarette's rising smoke.

You are beautiful now, just like you were that night-
bra-less, smiling with the grasshoppers
under amber-lit trees.

Dryad. The one old women warned them about,
only because you ate bread-jam with your left hand.
I come gladly, and with only one fear--

will you stay unhurt, tree-being, you whose hair
has grown long with moss and iguana song?
only the lack of faith ever killed a sprite;

and I have died many times over,
as I have killed, many times over.
I stare at the pictures you took:

under the night a cloud moves.
Under the green mist, a fish darts unnoticed.
This is how it will be, then--

passed over and precious,
like a cloud at night over Ecuador.
Like a fish at rest in sleeping reeds.