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From the outset Dearest,
it was to keep me from fading, vanishing entirely
absent with penned ellipses and words all bleeding
into feathers and blurs of ink, descending slants
and missed margins; I wanted you to take me in
wholly signed and postscripted, caught in webbings
of thin calligraphy, and paper that breathed like me
as it rustled and shifted in your hands.

I laced your letters with my perfume,
writing to you in so familiar a scent
to inspire the notions we hardly said evident
I love you I love you I love you
in such close proximity as skin on skin,
lips on pulse.  Your breath was hot
and it rendered whole scenes and figures
night-tangled on my neck in shivers and gooseflesh.
We sketched each other raw motifs in the borders,
lingerie motorbikes inamoratas tobacco pipes
the matter of our mutual imaginings come to life
in messages postmarked two days' delivery pending.

Rinsing words over the surface of stationery
was a fervor, heat left over from that summer
of real closecontact to sustain us through distance
with envelopes and stamps, cursive-scrawled viscera:
Where did you go?  Sometimes I forget
how mad and dizzying your absence can dwell
here, the trajectories you forged with your palm
in my hand, your smell on my sheets.

It was that smell that made me ache for you,
a shudder that pulled from the shoulders forward
and settled uneasy in the breastbone, a latent geyser
of want and languish and god, I wanted to brew
those layers of molten need in you. Ksh ksh ksh.

I anointed my signatures and printed affection
with the aroma you remembered on my skin,
from red glass bottles: Cacharel, Amor Amor.
So inhale this feverish and burn for me inside.