by Antony DiNardo

One summer it was all whites and sneakers, wine by the pool, the sun, the moon all the same smear of light, tongues meant to excite day or night and illustrate what else can be done when hands are free, if only for a savage stroke.

Some time we had, that time beneath the maple and the car still running.

Now it’s awash with winter, and lost in the rough, best pulled up like weeds and wildflowers mixed in early spring and left to wilt for weeks on a table set for one.

The grass lay low that year, a year on the green in combat gear stalking dandelion leaves before they claimed a victory of Roundup proportions.

The hedgerows, an inch from their lives, remained un-swallowed by the ever-crawling, everlasting sand traps next to the final hole, sun-commanded from above, orders coming down in shadow plays of light, not light.

We were an archipelago of leafy shade in the dying hour, those final moments when we were left alone.

And when we closed our eyes it was to fumble for our favourite parts like when we dug through pockets to look for keys that took us home and elsewhere.

We foraged, aroused not like animals but wilder because of hands and tongues, wild and lubricated.

We wouldn’t eat for days, stole the weekends to drink each other in behind the motel curtains that made it night all day.

I could read your face just listening to your breathing, the sudden gasp not searching for air but asking for more of what it was you were losing as you jerked your body into mine, the sudden loss of altitude, par for the course we had set, par for the game we stopped to play.

Antony DiNardo is the author of Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books) and Soul on Standby (Exile Editions), both books released in 2010. His poetry appears widely in journals across Canada and internationally. He divides his time between Oshawa, Ontario, and Sutton, Quebec.