These Visitations

These Visitations Brian Turner (bio) and Dorianne Laux (bio) If a love song is made of water, the wateryou hold in your hands right now is a lyric, a song inside the rusty tap released, coil of silvered music unraveling, shiveringin your cupped palms. A sweet thing, that. A gift channeling the acoustic nature of the world, even if it cannot be heard, here it is, held in the light of day, this strange transport of tugboats sounding through the fog of the harbor, flights to Detroit and Singapore lifting off the tarmac across the Bay, even the sound of us way back, making love. And sweet, too, the salt lick horsesare drawn to, that wild desire, what we leave for the privacy of their twelve-muscled tongues, mucosa-covered, the dorsal peppered with papillae, rough to the touch. Is love also made of this? I lean back and dunk my head into the steaming waters of the bath, my ropy hair soaking in the heat as if drinking from a summer long gone, while a lover's palm guides a bar of milled soap made of cassis and lime down the twin slopes of my back, humming, calming the small hurricanes that spiral inside me on days like this, window open to the bay sparking, flaring with each ripple and wave, the sun hidden between boulders, beneath trees, my hands palm up, floating, as your body, a ghost lost in mist, begins to sing. [End Page 39] Brian Turner Brian Turner is a writer living in Orlando, Florida. With poet Dorianne Laux, Turner collaborated on this fictional poem for an upcoming book, When You Ask for Something Beautiful. Dorianne Laux Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux's Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems is available from W. W. Norton, as are her award-winning books Facts about the Moon and The Book of Men. A textbook, Finger Exercises for Poets, is forthcoming as well as a new book of poems, Life on Earth. She is founding faculty at Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA Program. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma