by Rhoda Taylor
POST-COITAL
Afterwards I feel the little piston of your breath
On my neck, it’s gentle susurration warm and wet
Like a tropical breeze. I struggle to remember
Your sensation as the seconds fade into sleep
And you are behind me, fingers gently dancing
On the nape of my neck, in brief a wakeful dream,
Its moment short and sweetly capped by rest.
How deep the pleasure of this love and after sleep,
Some I can’t remember and some I never forget.
And yet that part which cannot last as memory
Is here forever written and unwritten until its end,
Wound and unwound like a cat with a ball of string,
That part of reality salvaged beyond the grave
Even if daft laughter, music and words take wing.
Michael Salcman: former chairman of neurosurgery, University of Maryland and president of The Contemporary Museum, a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. Poems in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Raritan and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti(nominated for The Poets’ Prize), The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, the anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medicine, A Prague Spring (Sinclair Poetry Prize winner), Shades & Graces (winner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, and Crossing the Tape (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024).
Rhoda Taylor was born in London England but has been living and working in Southern Ireland since 1996. https://rhodataylor.com