Valentines

Your memory lies sleeping amongst the crumpled covers
and toast crumbs of my bed: the pillow sweet

with the bare-earth scent of your smell; the duvet
warm with the faint impression of your shape.

And when the bedroom turns to half-light in the nightfall
I can almost feel the tensing of remembered limbs;

the gentle sliding of a downy arm
tracing curves and circles across my breast,

each imagined fingertip's flame
trail-blazing patterns, burning pathways, across my skin.

Your phantom breaths still play about my room,
I hear them every night; the broken quiver of exhalation

skimming against my cheek. And in the twilight of half-sleep
I can sometimes feel my body

wound again in creamy lace
and pressed with the same hush and crush of hipbones

against yours.
Ceiling stars dizzy in the salvo of my room

the blood dances about my artery at the thought
of your trembling hips,

the slight memory of our skin together,
the still point of a turning world; soft and eager and sexy,
all wet with dew.