Choose your Own

I pull him on top of me, say let go,
I want all of you.
Fully clothed but so very naked,
he asks
Is steadily increasing
closeness required? and I admit
(though not out loud)
that the way my ribs fall open
suggests, yes, I want him to enter
into me as tumblers
slip wide the hushed sliding
doors to a museum
where the glass wolf
eye and thinning lapwing feather
improvise a nest
in the last strip of silk from the wrist
of a deposed Saxon queen. This place
a low glimmer of a room
(it has only been rumored to exist)
and he is the unwitting key
as well as the single honored guest
passing us through virgin
corridors lined with relics
bearing no descriptions yet, one masterpiece
after another unfurling before our eyes,
no nameplate bolted into frame
and, come to that,
no frame.

He asks Can we have our vaults?
(his reliquary, a Parthenon of marvels
I circle in keen deference)
and I bite back the question
of whether he means spring
or safe (can we give and retain
with the same gesture?)
I say of course

and in this breath, speak a whole truth
with half a heart
threading its edge to one
who has the power of to draw
tunnels through concrete
and tilt the whole endeavor just enough
to spill us down to first strokes
of infant fingers through paint
whose color has neither been seen
nor imagined before
our eyes fall upon it. On me

he presses
open a fissure
between history and tomorrow
by defying logic
and lifting hands both
away from and into
gravity.