The Rib
My sweetest friend, spun ’round my wayward rib,
–the place still throbs that you were taken from,
and for the absence from my chest, its crib,
that childish bone must all my wish become.
Now borne within a tent of silken flesh,
as palanquin some holy relic bears,
that bone with which your tender sinews mesh
makes magnet toward which all my longing veers,
And so I crave to press my heart to yours,
that it might find that rib and beat thereon,
the rib which that thin gap alone remures,
whence flew my heart to search for sweetness gone.
Restore this rung and let my heart cvlimb up
and find again sweet Eden’s mountaintop.