Skin

My skin is an attentive
listener, it brims
with pent-up weeping,
red from the exertion,
when it hears
the sun’s long, lonely stories
seeping out of heaven.

My skin remembers
what the stove, the soap,
the bramble whisper.

Like those cards
libraries no longer
insert in covers,
charting the readers,
my skin keeps
the world’s attentions.

Draped in a shifting
landscape through whose
hills and fields
of hairs I hear,
my skin blends the fine
vibrato of the mosquito,
with the swelling
to crescendo
of the wasp’s gavotte,

and by it as by candlelight
I peruse the breeze
like a letter
from a lover overseas.