What happened at dinner, and after
We ate.
Baby lettuce, toasted pecans,
funky perfumed goat cheese
with its history of grass and sunshine.
We ate.
Black-flecked wild mushroom bisque
tasting of earthy beginnings in the lee of hundred-year hemlocks,
at the dark mouths of caves, beside slow-moving water.
We ate.
Angel hair pancake… corn, scallion and red pepper chutney,
regrets of summer and spring forgotten
as fall fell across Cape May like a glass bead curtain.
We touched glasses and ate.
Oysters, roasted in their Pleistocene shells, the glistening pouch of meat
a lover’s tongue slipped between our lips,
yielding, releasing its sea salt syrup.
We ate.
Fruit, pastry, something of chocolate,
things that made us look into one another’s eyes
and carry our shoes along the sand
with the full moon a silver hole in black heaven behind us.
Before us the sea rising and falling, thundering in the dark,
hissing about our feet in white foam ribbons.
You tilted your head beneath my chin like a violin,
the spinning air wove gossamer around us
and we rose, turning slowly, toward the silver hole in the sky.
Your lips touched mine, earth was a distant echo
and we were gone.
I like the line: “You tilted your head beneath my chin like a violin,”