Sometimes, After Making Love

When we feel the blood slip
through our arteries and veins,
sliding through the capillaries, thin as
root hairs, bringing bliss to the most
remote outposts of our bodies, delivering
oxygen and proteins, minerals, all the rich
chemicals our cells crave and devour
as we have devoured each other, I
lie there as sound reasserts itself,
and listen to the soft ticking of the clock
and a foghorn, faint from the lighthouse;
a car door slams across the street,
and I want to say something to you,
but it's like trying to tell a dream,
when the words come out flat as
handkerchiefs under the iron and the listener
smiles pleasantly like a person who doesn't
speak the language and nods at everything.
It should be enough that we have
lived these hours, breathing
each other's breath, catching the wind
in the sails of our bodies.
It should be enough. And yet
I carry the need for speech, strung
on the filaments of my DNA like black pearls,
from the earliest times when our ancestors
must have lain still, in amazement,
and groped for the first words.

- Ellen Bass