Linda Ann Strang – Ⅰ

Mahogany Handling 

 

 

 

How human touch, wears down wood –

hands, and buttocks even.

 

Though gentle as woodstars,

caresses and rubbings

 

leave the arms and legs of hardwood -

imbuia, mahogany, teak –

 

slim as the limbs of hamadryads

or bleached bird bones on a beach,

 

angels to woody thinness

beat. There’s a shaping poetry

 

in the unconscious everyday of hand

and second hand. Fingers

 

giddy as eagres change the coastline

of furniture like any force of nature:

 

inlaid work takes on a more delicate

air – curling waves of newborn tsunami hair;

 

ingrained whispers of mother of pearl;

colours of cameo, old gold locket,

 

the sepia shoulders of a wide-eyed girl.

So I can only wonder what power

 

and weather pattern your nipple wields

as it brushes against my cheek. Your glans

 

surely fashions me – impressionable

mahogany – forming the lusty intaglios

 

in the vagina’s secret patina. Daily

we find the yield of the womb’s honeycomb

 

in one another, tamer than imbuia  –

your thigh and my kiss like love and teak.