Secret
William Winfield Wright

Everyone knows that the mouths
of our loves taste like ripe peaches

or in your case salty mangoes
plus that morning of chocolate, night of red wine,

that we can’t go a week without thinking
that our hearts are birds and then fish.

In the elevator it was all I could do not to
push the both of us against the mirrored glass.

Where did she go, my hesitant princess
what happened to your fastidious bear

in the bath both tender and reckless
beneath the window unabashed?

Our secret is what we do with time,
how we make of it a bijou

to pass back and forth
in an afternoon’s kissing.

When you took my chin in your mouth
it was to cover it with time.

It was time I pushed inside you
with my tongue and then my hips,

time we took with us on walks,
time I tried to suck and suck from your fingers,

time, maybe not forty years, not your hundred nights
but a lot, a gift, our hurried abundance.

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