Water Serpents (David St. John)

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body
When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels
Currents in the dawn river
My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride
Echo from the hotel room next door
As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& 'in our dead lovers' eyes we can recall
Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness
& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where
The dark sailor's body is found