Compliment
We were both of two minds about adultery
and wasted our couple of stolen hours
half-undressed in the Afternoon Motel
kissing and drinking and doubting and foregoing.
She had never betrayed her husband before.
I said, “O.K., so don’t, let’s not, this has been
a lot of fun in any case.
But something inquisitive in her, in Eve,
would not move back from the brink,
and after the longest, gentlest time lying
side by side on the still-intact rented bed
(I admiring her upper lip while it twitched
in well-phrased trepidation, time running out),
there was a surge as in a written exam
when the answer had suddenly come to her;
we completed the half left un– (see above),
and the shy sea-creature of her ferny pubic hair
gave me something else to admire, and
a new aroma to activate my briny deeps.
She was sweetly tight but not dry, not quite
a virgin. ”O.K.?" I asked, half guilty,
glancing over at her proximate profile.
Tremulous eyelids nervily closed upon
a dreaming vision of the fallen world’s dooms,
and all the web of her sensations bent
to hold the pulsing bulk of this new captive,
she breathed the single smiling word “Terrific.”
