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Dorothy Bates

A wanderer came to a woman who lived by a wall.
I will not take your money from you, he said,
I want to know you. I want to know you in the way
of bees and dandelions.
There is a way to put lovelocks into the pockets
of lone women that makes stars grow
in the blackberry patch.
Will you take me to your clapboard?
She felt in her wrist a small jumping toad.
The life of her body began to flow like river water.
She looked into the sunlight of his face
in the rainbow arc of the evening.
His hair lay loose and jumpy with a curvedown
like the tail of a black gosling.
I cannot take a young, black-eyed boy
to my bed, she thought.
His tongue was peach and pomegranate.
Dark lashes lay across his cheek
where he slithered his eyes in the moonlight.

What can a maiden do with a gosling who wears
like a swan, she wondered.
What the woman expected was crackle and snap from him,
but he held her away and said, Wait until I tell you.
She brought him bread baked in the granary kitchen
and a jug of wine made from flower petals.
He drank it with delicacy and asked her to give him
a bed in the barn.
He waited by the door. When the rainwater came.

he flushed the floor with elm branches.
I need no barnservant, she said. Bring me peach sticks
and hawthorne branches to burn on a salamander fire altar.

He opened her cupboard and brushed her hair to clinging vines.
He came into her baker's oven and took her breasts
which had lain hidden in a cabinet against the wall.
In the country of her morning dishes,
she led him to her goosedown.

Ah, those were nights of glistening rivers of milk
on her thighs. His mouth was a snail that sucked her dry
and made the flow go on from nightingale song until lark time.
He held out his hands. Blood shone on his moon rings.
She held them in buttermilk and washed his fingers white.

There is no man can keep a woman better
than one who gives her fresh butter
and his trueness.

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Dorothy Bates has worked on the editorial staff of Scientific American & Avant-Garde magazines, as writer of special material for cabaret performers, and has been writing poetry since 1995. She has been published extensively in print and on the Internet. Her poems are included in the following anthologies, all published in 2003: Off the Cuffs: ( Soft Skull Press ), The Pagan's Muse: Poems of Ritual and Inspiration (Kensington Publishing Corp.),Wondrous Web Worlds Vol.4, (Sam's Dot Publishing), From Porn to Poetry, Vol.2, Samba Mountain Press.