Two Love Poems
       

We first kissed a year ago, in the concrete alley
behind my apartment: wooden steps connecting
floor to floor, tomato plants, that dried-up sponge,
an old collapsing table by the basement door:
above us the sooty emerald salt sky over Capp Street,
almost crowded out by telephone wires and the high,
weather-worn wall of the next building: back there
in the alley whose closed-in corners are home
to the skinny, matted, mistrustful,
raspy cats who fight and mate all night in the dark.

*

First I lodge my fingers
deep, deep at
the roots, then pull
them out
slowly, trailing along the thick,
wired length of your hair's
catalog of brown: darker
than this wooden table, close to black,
and lighter, too, a gold and cherry color streaming
into red when touched by light. I love
its electric tangle's resistance
to brush and fingers—each strand
vivid, distinct from the rest—together
they rise up from your head
in a swell of umber, red, and gold,
untamable.

Copyright © 2010 Eric Gudas All rights reserved
from Best Western and Other Poems
Silverfish Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission