Remembering Bodies

by T.L. Stokes
(Mill Creek, WA USA)

Each awakening
we come from the night country
with nothing in our hands.

I forget my name,
and only the last tags of color
and feeling, those last bits
of dream

are drug lightly
as if we walked through a darkened wood
with left-behind-webs
caught on our elbows.

We lie here, remembering
fiber by fiber,
remade into what the brain
mystically recalls

we should be:

our bodies, our images
of what we think we know.

And what I do know is this,
I love you again. As your secret
warmth impales my cells,
like bathwater,

your lovely body rises
as if it were all colors and light
and sings in the silence
for my ears only.

This is love,
in the time, one of my favorite times,
when the shortest memory in the brain,
that of the book of my dreams

finishes forgetting,
I remember you.