Oh, I could absorb that man-
like so many thousand grains of monsoon-perfumed rice
softening to wedding pearls in a black iron pot.
I could suck that man in through my pores,
like scorched sesame seed oil taken in through
petal-thin skin, and scraped, burning,
into heaving lungs.
I could wipe him up off the splintered floor
with my metre-long hair.
I could grow around him, in a tortured embrace,
like a two-hundred-year-old Morton Bay fig
around a slab of guano-speckled granite.
I could burn him to white willow ash in my furnace
to make a lye of his secrets and silences.
I could be the fuzzed green corset,
and he could be the violet bud, crippled with waiting.
I could be the petrol-smear wipe of a dirty rainbow,
and he could be the oiled leaves of the khaki tree-tops.
I could be the airmail-blue shell, and he could be
the folded bird.
I could be the grey charity blankets, and he could be
the grateful sleep.
I could be the gulping throat, and he could be the bright,
unripe wine.

I hurt with a catgut of longing every plinked,every plonked,
every pizzicato second of the high-strung day.
Every twitch of the nervous hands of my wrist-watch
is a tiny tack of wanting tapped into place.
And how did I ever get myself kidnapped? marooned
in this jungly outpost?
I met him. I stood in one place.
The rest of the tangled, strangled collision
was already mapped.