THE LOVE OF LADIES

Joni trills
in the shower
while I play
in the days' news.
Coffee bounces
from sleepy beds
of conflict
& balm
as I smell her skin
being put on--
fragrant layers
like fronds
in our overheated
hothouse.

In the afternoon
while evening sleeps
so peacefully, I'll read
to Toni her words--
music in a white man's mouth
drunk on her rhythms turning
the heart's coal
into diamonds.

Tonight, there's Simone,
both Nina & deBeauvoir,
their acid tongues disrobing
my bourgeois notions
of all things man
and all matter, women.
How we might be glued
to this affair of living,
but the living need not
be less than joyful.

And then,
there is you--
a fugitive
from your body's embrace,
a renegade from your country's enclosure,
who I've loved all my life
without knowing not your name,
but your jouissance,
who I whisper to, who I pray to,
in the dark--
blue as the tangle of smoke
from a shared cigarette
as it rises in the moonlight,
as gentle as wisps,
from Miles' Spanish horn.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019