The Red and Pink Taste of You

Do you remember the first time we made love?

The house so quiet when I walked in,

So full of the forgetting of things, so empty of fullness.

The shadows were afraid of me, I think.

I opened the door and felt them shift and sigh.

I think they knew they could not live there anymore,

Would have to find another house that had forgotten things.

I turned on the lights and they shuffled out into the dark.

I woke you with my heavy steps in the kitchen,

The house, waking up, remembered the sound of me.

You were sleepy and just a little shy.

You buried your face into my shirt,

Timid and warm and beautiful as night.

I held you close, feeling you, touching the hot, little pulse of you.

I tilted your chin to meet my eyes, my lips.

You tasted like warm honey and lightning,

You tasted like yellow sunshine and red fire.

You turned off the lights and came back to me,

Found me there in the darkness without shadows.

We could not keep our hands from knowing each other.

You took mine and led me to the bedroom.

I followed you through smooth, familiar darkness.

We did not speak, did not fill the moment with words.

The silence waited to hear the sounds we would make.

The heat of your breasts filled my hands with creamy light.

Your hard nipples, dark points in it.

You pulled me down to you, into you, like a whispered secret,

A hot, wet, secret, pulsing in the darkness between us.

We whispered it softly, you and I, gentle as the night,

Giving the silence a shape, a form, a sound.

We filled and stretched and sang it between us,

The little pulsing whisper, the song of our bodies,

The soft, smooth song of souls touching, loving, embracing,

The hard, pounding song of thunder and hot rain,

The throbbing song of stretching, pulsing life,

Delicate and sweet as petals opening to the sun.

You washed me with the wetness of it and,

I woke with the taste of you on my lips,

The red and pink taste of you, like summer wine.

Eric M. Petit