I lie awake, listening to your breath,
Your hair, a dark tangled mystery upon the pillow.
Asleep, you are heavily fragrant with your own perfume,
A challenge to the scent of lilacs and laurel,
Wafting in at the open window.
The flowers from the garden, too,
Steal into our sacred chamber,
Striving to overcome your aromatic loveliness.
And farther away, the Wind harps through pines and maples,
gusts across meadow and river,
offers their weakened scents to me.
More potent are you.
Out of your limbs, your breast, belly, thighs
An incense rises up,
Calling my spirit to worship, arousing my senses to love.
You are an angel of ambrosia,
Divinely fragrant,
A match for the food of the gods.
But I dare not say that aloud
For the moon goddess will hear
And Leto, in a jealous rage,
Will turn you to stone
Or steal your heavenly odor,
Put it in a bottle and cast it into the sea.
But if I breathe your ambrosia deeply enough,
Will I become immortal?
Perhaps not, but my poem may live forever,
Infused with the exhalation of the Earth,
That is to say, with you.
