Julie Fay
Young Lovers On My Beach
He’s on top of her, barely
moving, at the swimming hole
I’ve called mine for years.
Here, to be anything but naked
is nearly sacrilegious.
In the quick red canyon
water sears the dusty plain.
My daughter plays,
oblivious to them, delicious
in her two-year skin,
but I can’t not look
(and must if I’m to keep
a mother’s eye on her).
She delights the minnows
with her toes, plops and squeals
as the woman’s thighs rise, gently
fall just so, flex with his in red
volcanic sand coarse as coffee.
Do they really think I don’t know
he’s pushed their suits aside just enough
to slip inside? I’m annoyed, surprised
at the depth of my resentment.
It’s not that I’m a prude
American in France, I go topless
with the best of them, nude as often as I might
and don’t deny them
the deliciousness of summer’ s air
on bare skin, the water’s green deep,
or fern-drip on rocks red as tongues,
singing bugs tuned to their forever coning
(if they’d just get it over with
for heaven’s sake and let us all go on!)
Is it that the married sex
I’ve come to know’s so hurried and sequestered?
Or is it that they say to me
you don’t exist. We are the whole
of this pocket paradise and you ‘re no more
than a mote of cottonwood that floats
past us and we don’t see?
Page(s) 155
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