Five Poems

The Movement of Bodies

He fractured white light into seven colours,
reckoned the distance to the moon,

wrote laws for the movement
of bodies: no mystery to him

until now. Planets in their orbit,
the sea's tides, his eyes

locked to the lit face
of the young mathematician.

A body at rest remains so
unless some force act on it.

So many years, no joy
but in numbers, no troubling

of the flesh. The pink tongue-tip
idly licking a finger

constricts his heart. His edges
...