What Is Uncharted Remains

America has never been that much
of a comfort for me, even
in my childhood maps, the states
veined and colored body parts
as puzzle pieces, and every edge

holding its integrity, pushing
to the Pacific. Even those maps
weren’t much help in finding
missing places. This America where

I love you is a country on the air,
an electronic grid careening no
where, until some of us sift through,
landing in Ocala, Seattle, or this

West Virginia, where you are showering
in lotions and steamy water, after
I have spilled my semen in you.
I am lying on your bed, hearing
the water run, and you are standing or

kneeling, massaging your legs, a soft
pliè, open to the cascading.
The water sweats upon your face.
Love, your body is the shape

of persuasion, and I know its
impossible geographies: near the rose
of your areola, and there my mouth
is there, over the shadowed freckles
that my lips have wished to claim.

About us, the Americas sound
their diminishments, photonic and noisy
and permanent. There is no place
for answering. Here, in this house,

you are in the next room, and I am
imagining you, imagining against
the grid, gathering words for hard times,
trying to possess one human telling

of how I love the fierce rise
of your body, its blue moment that does
not dissipate. Sitting, you bend
with your own hands on your calf,
kneading, and the smell of our sex

flows from you, traces of oil, spin,
and come, a film expanding
in its dissolution, an undiscovered
continent adrift and disappearing.

American and alone, I have to wonder
if I am the last one in the house.
No, I hear you singing I don’t know
what. And in the other room,

the lovebirds are calling, roused
in the dark, calling to calm away
the fearing, each one flashing its own
color, a trembling picture coming
alive and perishing, as these uncharted

sounds find me. I will sing back
in any old note, any man’s song
of shoring and love, a sound for you,
an answer, a calling, a founding.

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