Walking by a freshly painted house, the color a certain shade of blue, with patches of white still showing through, my nostrils flare and fill with those invisible turpentine fumes, and which grow weaker as I recede away into the evening light,

thinking this is how I approach you too, first thing after waking, you voice low and crackling with sleep, your body that hue of sky as it is breaks open with light, you scent of fruit flaming in the half dark, a dawn firefly visible even before I see or touch you -

O, why do I keep forgetting not to Touch your dream wet body yet? Why do I keep wanting more than this sufficiency of sound, vision and smell?

I like looking at pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. "Don't touch it," he says. "Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can't fly." - Margaret Atwood in 'Cat's Eye'

I find you sleeping under your old blanket, your hands, oily as you claim, on your face like clouds covering the moon or the wings of a luna moth, pale green crescents hiding a throbbing grace. I daub myself with it. And thus I am sunk in your dust. You can't fly away from me now like some receding star, for you are everything I now cradle in my slick lines of fate, the glimmer, the essence, of a life.