An Encounter

By: Alison Luterman

We met naked on the sun deck by the
clothing-optional hot springs,
and I saw the long scar
like a smile across his furred abdomen
where they'd cut the cancer out of him.
He trained people in death and dying,
he told me;
divorced, he'd recently discovered poetry.

We talked as if my loose breasts
were not flopping companionably
against the knee I hugged to my chest.
Sunlight pooled on the wooden deck
like soup -- sun soup. A woman did yoga
by the railing, her slender arms
assailing heaven.

I confessed that I am afraid to die
with poems left unsaid inside me,
and he said, "You will.
You'll die with a great poem in your heart
that will never see paper."

We were quiet then. A bee buzzed
perilously close to my sweaty thigh,
and I heard it: I heard
the danger and sweetness inside everything.