Moccasin

There is a cricket in the tall grass

at my elbow, chirping irregularly

in the warm evening

as the sky purples into night.

We are side by side in the field

behind my house, near the pond

where we spent the afternoon

skinny-dipping. Under my head

is a Spider-Man comic book, 

under yours your t-shirt.

A breeze runs up my shins, 

my inner thighs, over my stomach,

across my chest, up my neck

and into my hair and away, 

and I feel - though I don't know - 

that I've been kissed from my toes

to my crown by gentle, delicate lips

not unlike yours. I think you are asleep;

I can hear, beneath the rustling grass,

the deep rhythmic cycle of your breath.

I close my eyes and remember your 

body slipping through the water

like a snake, and I remember how we met:

I was walking the river path and I saw you

bent like a reed over the bank, hanging from

a curving willow branch, dipping your long

fingers into the slow-moving stream. I stopped

in my tracks, I surely did, and looked at you,

slim and golden and fearless. Someday,

I told myself, I will kiss you. 

It feels very much like someday now,

in the tall grass, your thin chest rising

and falling beside me, the smell of 

sunshine on your skin, your freckled shoulder

warm next to mine. 

Somedays, though, pile up, accumulate;

like counting the seconds between a

lightning strike and a thunderclap -

anticipation, fear, and then

the storm has moved on far away,

into someone else's sky. 

Perhaps I will never kiss you;

or I will do it now, or now, or now.

Or turn my heartbeat into a

cricket's chirping, a nocturne

for your dreaming mind, your 

unmoored body, to sail you closer

to the shore of my own sea.