this beauty, my body, and always there are other
eyes from which to hide, like that summer night
we spent in the one-room cabin on the lake, feast
of corn and grilled potatoes, some 80s movie
on the tiny TV, and then—our limbs swim-tired—
sleeping stalls, side-by-side, your mother’s bed
in one, mine in the other, and you with a clear
view from your pallet on the floor. Moonlight
shone on me from a small high window
and must have lit the water, too, but we couldn’t
see that shimmer, only this: me lifting my nightgown
slowly, you rising to your elbows, one eye on your
mother’s sleep, both on me and wide with awe,
like a sailor born on ship, spotting the only land
he’s ever seen. You’d told me weeks before
that the worst torture you could imagine
was finding yourself on one side of a glass wall
and on the other a naked woman, and wasn’t that
your life then, at sixteen—desire and barriers
to desire—and by torture, didn’t you mean
an ache, prolonged and hungry ache, and didn’t
you like it as I did, isn’t that why for a long moment
I sat so still in secondhand glow before letting
my dress fall, cover my own light? If I’m wrong,
I’m sorry—if in this way we’re not the same—
but I remember my breasts, perfect, pale
and blue-veined and pink-tipped, and I remember
that gesture as a gift. Anyway, I wasn’t so cruel,
even then—next morning when you asked me
to walk in the woods, float beside you in the old
canoe, I did, and there in sunlight tempered only
by the lace of leaf shadow, accident of passing
cloud, I let you see me again, touch me, and if
there were other eyes in the world, I let myself forget.