Taking me to your reading room

Where you keep your story books

In the shadowed corner, fearful ones

With green-eyed frightening looks

Over on the sunny side

You keep such comedies

As is want for passtimes gently spent

Before a window’s open breeze

By the cold forbidding northern wall

You keep all life’s tragedies

And all the very worst them

Must be read while on your knees

But over to the warming south

Burns your hearth’s salvation fires

The safe repose for love poems

And your unfulfilled desires

Take me to your reading room

Let me linger there with you

I’ll let you turn each private page

For the honor of the view

Read, please read, for me all evening

Until I fall asleep

Let dreams of dragons you have seen,

Demand my eyes also weep

As I turn in your soft embrace

Let me hear your hopeful laugh

For of all that I could learn from you

I’ve scarcely touched the half

When the silent dawn light enters

Let me feel your warming skin

For I’m sensing nascent lyrics

Begin their new song from within

Wake me then, before your hearth fire

To a day of sun or cloud, and

Speak such sacred secret stirrings

That only whispers are allowed. 

And when confessions have their end

As we tarry by that fire

Let me read your body’s untold story

In telltale eloquent desire.