I Want To Ask You Poem by Aida Santos

I want to ask you:
When our bodies touch
Gliding like ice in a summer day
Hands akin to an eye
Watching the moistening skin
That covers the length of your back
And breast, and buttocks
Against the yellow light
Of the shadows flirting with the
Incandescent lamp across the street,
Do you still know me-
The guts of my loving
The tenderness of the scent
Of the sampagita that bloom
In my window pane,
As I glide against the flesh
That seems so familiar
And yet a stranger to your memory?

Do the maps of memories
Begin to fade because the weather
Is so humid, and your mind is
Journeying to somewhere else
A land where your books and travels
Shaped a new mind, a new body, a new territory
Of loving: she, of pasty white skin
Aquiline nose that reminds me of our colonizers
A speech that barely touch the soul
Because of its strangeness
And possibly, youth and a more nubile body.

Ask me too: does this skin
That for many years was a blanket
To your sleep, a comfort
Like down, like feathers that lull
You, nearly a lullaby after a frenzied
Lovemaking? Please ask me
Because I have all the answers, for
Even the shadows flirting with the incandescent lamp
Have stayed the same, nothing have changed
Except perhaps you, and I have remained.

(2006)