Hiding from Issue 83
It’s loud enough to make the rafters ring,
that crack! of hide on hide. They slam together,
beating time, a steady, startling
tattoo on untanned skin by well-tanned leather.
There hides, in such romantic aberrations,
a kind of poetry. Not in the fleshy bounce,
the heat, the moans, the artless undulations,
but their intensity; the way it mounts,
a metaphor whose gentle tenor hides
behind the ruddy face of something else—
something that shares a bloodline, like a brother,
and moves with the same familiar, rhythmic strides,
likened less by the eye than by the pulse—
one act of love that hides inside another.