I Who Know You Best Poem by Rory Hudson

I who know you best
have seen your lips
loose with laughter, trembling
on the edge of love
and ready to forgive
my foolishness too often repeated
in exchange for a moment
which you clasped to your heaving breast
under the scented eucalypts
in the gold-tinted afternoon.

There we found the tree
that I named for you -
standing in solitary beauty,
its loveliness inhabited
by the songs of a thousand birds
flying free in the air that gave them life,
its sadness rooted
in the rich earth that dies and is renewed
over and over beyond the reach of time.

I who know you best
have gone there again
to know the night from which you came to me
naked, before I clothed you
in translucent dresses of desire,
your body bare beneath the filmy gauze
clinging to the contours of your heart’s hope -
and now
to know the night to which you have returned,
slipping sadly out of garments, one by one,
in a slow striptease of the soul,
taunting the swollen beacon of my desire
until it fades and is extinguished
in the nothingness of your new night.