You sleep the way the river sleeps in August,
barely moving, sure of where it is going.
The shutters let in seven thin stripes of morning
and I count them across your back
like a woman checking the lines of a letter
she already knows by heart.
Somewhere downstairs, the baker's van.
Somewhere, a radio that cannot decide on a song.
I don't touch you yet.
That is the whole luxury of this hour —
not the touching, the not yet,
the linen warm on one side and cool on the other,
your shirt on the chair still holding the shape
of your shoulders from last night
as if it were waiting to be told.
When you turn, you turn into the light
and the light does what I wanted to do:
it finds the hollow of your throat,
the small scar under your jaw you say came from a bicycle,
the place where your pulse is
keeping time for both of us.
I have mended old cloth for twenty years.
I know how a thread forgives a needle.
I know which knots hold.
Stay. The coffee can go cold.
Let the city have its noise.
Here the only work left
is learning the weave of you again,
slowly,
by hand.
