Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so they don’t float apart
in the midst of dreaming, but in my mind my phantom hand
clutches yours all the time, even when I’m off on the other side
of the world doing book tours for a novel in which every page
was written about you. The other night on TV Neil degrasse Tyson
spoke about the birth and death of stars, but every time I stared
into the grainy shots of black holes parading across the screen,
all I saw was the vortex of your mouth when you sucked me into it.
My literary agent warns me profusely to stop penning poems
related to the whorl of your ear, but what he doesn’t appreciate
is that no one else in this gigantic universe will ever have
so much poetry written about a single body part.
If I lean in close enough, I can hear the ocean.
In my daydreams, sitting at a desk in a stuffy cubicle
surrounded by stacks of Hemingway and Voltaire, I’m kissing
your left elbow in Times New Roman, the inside of your right knee
in Helvetica point 16. It’s not uncommon that I want to spellcheck
each and every place my mouth has touched.
My readers recite my poems underwater in swimming suits
two sizes too big, get drunk and stage impromptu readings
in pool chairs. If I were where you are right now,
I could go through every masterpiece in my repertoire
simply by whispering your first and last name.