Egyptian Cotton by Richie Hofmann

Egyptian Cotton

 

Once nothing separated us but the gossamer

of sheets—white and gauzy in the summer, when a world

of heat blew in, inflating

the curtains into the room that was his

and mine, when no one else was there—

nothing between the body, whose hot-bloodedness,

whose frailty I had come to know

the duration of my life,

                                            and the body

he drank cool water with, the body he salted, mile after mile

along the coast, fucked me with, with which

he told me what troubled him

                                                          —the two of us in our bed

of Egyptian cotton.

The sea reflected us, our human emotions.

Then the sea refused us, like the sea.