blamelessly

Your toes:
modest stalagmites
sticking up in the ice caves
of the winter bed.

Your toes:
succulent mushrooms,
stumpy chimney pots
rising in their row.

Wee round faces
anonymous as nuns,
callused, worn as coolies
aging in their traces.

Small fry,
wriggling moonbeam
minnows escaped from the dark
traps of your shoes.

Pipsqueak puppets,
piglets nosing,
soft thimbles, dumpy
sofa pillows of flesh.

Love dwells in the major caves of the psyche,
chewing on the long bones of the limbs of courage,
the great haunches of resolution,
sucking the marrow bones, caves lit
by the lasting flames of the intellect,

but love cherishes too the back pockets,
the pencil ends of childhood fears,
the nose picking and throbbing sweet tooth,
the silly hardworking toes that curl
now blamelessly as dwarf cats
in the tousled nest of mutual morning bed.

[Marge Piercy, 'The Back Pockets of Love', from Stone, Paper, Knife--reprinted in The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010]