Morning is an idea--what unites all mornings when, arcticly

speaking, the sun need not rise in the morning,

and there are those of us who do not get up with the creaking

of the sun's wheels?

But when the idea of morning comes

across the bare plate tectonics

of our shared bed, Julia, and nine-o-clock light

From the Venetians makes its late

and patchy sunrise across the mere

geology of your legs, your hips, these Appalatchian

foothills as of Huntsville, Alabama or up beyond,

rising as to the Smokies, to these mountains

of your chest, fuller and rounder than mine but

With no iron in the nipples, I see a paradise land,

not the body but the shape only, of a woman,

a form of light, hills, valleys, the forests of your secret

mountain, not land but the idea of land and not a

body but a woman herself,

her mind and her presence in my

mind and the thought that bridges both.