Anya Smith – Mountain Messaged Erotica

Anya Smith’s three-part sequence poem, “Mountain Messaged Erotica”, is narrative rife with outdoorsy rustic goodness and passion. Each scene shimmers with glorious natural imagery of mountains, ice, waters, and woods, but a sensuous tension is interwoven in the lines and in the story Anya offers in her poem.

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Mountain Messaged Erotica

1

The mountains surrounded us, yet from the lake
all was letters in lichen and strewn boulders
bits and pieces in amongst the debris. Tenuously,
as if they could trip me, I had navigated
sharp edges and steep banks, to join you 
for nerves soothed in an alpine bath, and
nothing, only the vague promise of the intimate
magnified between narrow peaks of longing that
called out for new growth, to the less discreet 
coarse ones beyond them, bringing these two
who rambled through a valley, to a shared stream.

 2

Waiting alone; blanket, pins and needles
for a knock on a wooden door, for an axe
and an outline through snow, blurred and
twisting, then focused; dark hair, soft hands
eyes flashing sparks and clouds, each touching 
the fibre, to move off cold smoke through
many storms to a silence, each time only one
stroke, each touch a fracture on a frozen sheet
hammered against the glacial moraine, an ice age
of skin in firelight, just waiting to melt.

 3

Then in my truck, the backroad, thermos tea cup
brewing one hand braced on a handle, I slipped
against your lips placed hip-high, tumbling down
the sides. We opened the door to the mountain again
bent over, laughing in snow, chasing between tight trees, 
secret gullies, so that I could fly over banks
before hard ground grabbing, dodging branches
you slid across my favourite line, playing cold
white light, when there was no one there, then
everyone and line ups, hot underneath sweating layers
we thawed again on a chair calling, though I couldn’t quite 
hear you, when you reached out your hand. I held it.