VARUN RAVINDRAN

ARABESQUE

For Lhasa de Sela

Xochipilli, I won't insist on more than this,
this ajar thing called "Lhasa," in the morning
more than this breath falling into morning.
Given what we're given: skin, tongue.

Skin to tongue. Thigh to fold, breeze.
Breeze like scouring hands or hours
breeze full of hours the hour we fondle—

Xochipilli, I won't insist on more than this:
this river in an ajar morning both hearse, cradle,
unbraiding, extending, holding, forgetting.

SEASON/BODY

Line in palm with broad bend, the way mouth wends to swollens counterside or shuns—the wildernesses—nests of the pits, each maned, each shoaled nipple.

Unrolling it, thew clings lip; saltwhetheavy the cock breaching lip—its sounding its dead reckoning its savaging of the swallowplace where sound rises, or word or music or does not—

When the mould of breath paste of spit made architecture of pubic tangle, in the deepwarm of betweenthighs I—too—Orpheus—Phenomenist— looked—

his head aground on its decaying pleasure, the window behind him. His cock his cock fuck the whole wet stress of it. The gleam of it among all the dull snarl and spangle of my glutton’s slaver. Each pulse in it consequent to each breath’s heft lengthening drops of seed into stream.

I pulled, rolled his balls to turn his tongue, tongued thighs ajarer ajarer lifted legs delved damask, rung out in the goldmesh dusk of him the cornsilk fold and pinch of him, the weight of him the All of him—eyelash of tracery, sinew, muskshine, chalice, sphincter, contortion of limb into limb into limb into limb into beinghoods mine, notmine, I all hole he matter, he cathedral I his volume.

Out the window the doubling time—gleaming looming looming phyllomanic world. Spring. Finchdregs flinging through arches in shaking branches into the scalloping eye chokebright sibyl reading—

“leaving and leaving all the loams too lurch, pushing off the harbors of rooted feet feather root but then turns and returns to each transfigured freckle—returns each nest, arbor, each darkeyed junco muddy or mudcolor—each bobolink like bargello on the birches even as I rake in my halflife—my breath in him-in-me perched on me—tongue in taint—cock leaking into a tract of sound fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck sore-eyed sorekneed a calf choking in each hand

“—but if I quaked he would shatter so he quakes sobful of sallow open wing takes throatful of forest open mouth claims dewfulness dewfulness fullness which now, now,

“will dissemble and the lissome Huma whose touch-of-shade puts kings in things never alights—peripatetic as music or knowledge or love or rain—or the quantum of a time—

Varun Ravindran was born and lives.