Your Hair is Cedar

            Your hair is cedar, your eyes
rhododendron, your skin
the willow's helicopter-catkins;

            I fall atop your gray cloud,
you stick to my skin. I drink
a bottle of our favorite cabernet

            then another—when I awake
it's raining & you're off me—
I go in to shave and it's an okay

            shave, stubble in the beauty-
bark indents, some tiny cuts
pouring blood, the face does

            that, I'm a bleeder, otherwise
an excellent boxer before I
quit. To you I was always

            a man even when my
career went nowhere, when you
worked 2 jobs, when I didn't bring you

            a book in the hospital,
at the end, because I was drunk. You
loved me, you praised me to strangers.

Copyright © 2004 Sean Brendan-Brown All rights reserved
from Terminus
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission