He reached out to her; she stepped into his arms. His hands slid lightly up her back, craddled her shoulders. She felt contained in his embrace, never confined.

“It's late in the autumn,” she said. “Getting on toward winter.”

“Time to harrow, perhaps,” said Jakt. “Or perhaps it's already time to kindle up the fire and keep the old hut warm before the snow comes.”

He kissed her and it felt like the first time.

“If you asked me to marry you all over again today, I'd say yes,” said Valentine.

“And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.”

They had said the same words many, many times before. Yet they still smiled to hear them, because they were still true.

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek tu understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

They talked with their bodies. It wasn't all hands, as I'd thought. Any part of the body in contact with any other was communication, sometimes a very simple and basic sort—think of McLuhan's light bulb as the basic medium of information—perhaps saying no more than “I am here.” But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation. What I wanted to know was what were they saying? I knew, even at that dim moment of realization, that it was much more than I could grasp. Sure, you're saying. You know about talking to your lover with your body as you make love. That's not such a new idea. Of course it isn't, but think how wonderful that talk is even when you're not primarily tactile-oriented. Can you carry the thought from there, or are you doomed to be an earthworm thinking about sunsets?

Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily so—somewhere in telling his story, he’s figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they’re just getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.

“It's your decision,” said Ender, “whether you want me with you, as one of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo. If you do, then I believe I can make my way through all the other obstacles.”

She laughed nastily. “Obstacles? Men like you don't have obstacles. Just steppingstones.”

“Men like me?”

“Yes, men like you,” said Novinha. “Just because I've never met any others. Just because no matter how much I loved Libo he was never for one day as alive as you are in every minute. Just because I found myself loving as an adult for the first time when I loved you. Just because I have missed you more than I miss even my children, even my parents, even the lost loves of my life. Just because I can't dream of anyone but you, that doesn't mean that there isn't somebody else just like you somewhere else. The universe is a big place. You can't be all that special, really. Can you?”

She cried out, and here was Dan Currier, professional (obsessional) consoler: a cry was to be heeded, the affliction of pain was to be stopped and existing pain consoled. This is everything I was and everything I meant to be. But now at my first great delving lunge, miraculously made swift and easy, she cried out, and I withdrew almost all the way and lunged again so deep and so hard that it bruised my pubic bone against hers, and again she cried out, louder. Of course there was pain, that shattering drive of flesh into flesh and bone against bone, and my great weight on her and my big arms locked around her so that the cry was forced out as shockingly as it was driven out by whatever was moving her. How, then she could take in enough air to do what she did I can not explain, but she cried out again and again, each cry like a plucked string, sharply appearing and fading, four, five … seven of them, diminishing. And with each cry, that incredible gripping inside, but harder, stronger than I had ever known it, so much so that I could realize, now, that I had not felt those earlier ones, but merely sensed them.

She was silent at last, and drenched with sweat from head to foot. I took my weight off her, raising myself on my elbows and placing my hands on the sides of her face and locking my gaze with hers. In hers I saw only a great wonder—no fear, no pain—and in this and in the strange slack slightly swollen new shape of her lips, such love as I have never known.

I began to move slowly, deeply inside her, and then, like a slow-motion reenactment of that first great drive, withdrew almost all the way and pressed inward again, right to the root. Each time I penetrated to that depth her eyes almost closed, but not quite—not enough to sever the cable of withness that had been woven between her eyes and mine. We had never done this in the light before; we had never seen each other experiencing it; I think that in a deeply important way we had never seen each other.

She went with me willingly, bewildered, until she found herself at the foot of the stairs, and then she held back—not much at all, but even that little made something explode inside me. I picked her up like a doll and sprang up the stairs two at a time and crossed the upstairs hall as if my feet, somehow, weren't touching the floor; but we were at the top of an arc, having been thrown by some huge force. The bed was a blaze of gold from the tops of the two wide windows and a floodlight of sun; there was nothing on it but the bottom sheet, and I dropped her, or threw her down. She bounced, she screamed; I took her wrist and hauled her up sitting and broke the two top buttons off the soft denim jacket, then got hold of the hem and snapped it off over the head. She wore nothing under it, which was a vast surprise to me; I hadn't known, one way or the other—how could I? I punched her shoulder with the heel of my hand and down she went on her back; I snapped her waistband as if it had been a single thread and snatched her skirt off. Her sandals had disappeared somewhere along the way, and she lay naked in that glory of light. I had seen her naked before, of course, but I had never let myself look at her, really look, and as I got out of my clothes—it seemed to take forever, but it couldn't have been long, for I tore my shirt and ripped the zipper in my trousers halfway down; one of my socks, I found later, was still in its shoe!—I held her pinned down to the bed in the circle of my vision with her eyes tied to mine in the center of it. I was breathing deeply but not rapidly at all—strange, that—while her breath came and went like a pulse, making and losing shadows between her ribs and the superb taut hollows at the sides of her belly. And as I held her so, where she lay with her arms crossed over her breasts and her hips half-turned, one knee drawn up to conceal herself, something from me—a demand which was not anger, but still was like a fury—reached out invisible hands and pulled those arms down and away from her breasts, dropped the small strong hands curled to the sheet, rolled back the hips, straightened that leg. The sunlight (you take pictures in your mind at certain moments) slanted down through the hair on the mound between her legs and tinted the skin under it, making the clear cream-color radiate up—a wonder. It was all a wonder, even in the violence and speed of the act itself, frozen forever in the mind, ready to be retrieved forever after, spellbinding, breathtaking.

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions. The air is torn with dreadful sounds as though, all at once, that person wheezes, barks, and chokes to death. The face contorts in grimaces that mix smiles and yawns with snarls and frowns. What could cause such a frightful seizure?

i'm a fountain of blood
in the shape of a girl
you're the bird on the brim
hypnotized by the whirl

drink me—make me feel real
wet your beak in the stream
the game we're playing is life
love's a two way dream

leave me now—return tonight
tide will show you the way
if you forget my name
you will go astray
like a killer whale trapped in a bay

i'm a path of cinders
burning under your feet
you're the one who walks me
i'm your one way street

i'm a whisper in water
a secret for you to hear
you're the one who grows distant
when I beckon you near

i'm a tree that grows hearts
one for each that you take
you're the intruders hand
i'm the branch that you break

leave me now — return tonight
tide will show you the way
if you forget my name
you will go astray

like a killer whale trapped in a bay

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

Three matches one by one struck in the night
The first to see your face in it's entirety
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me of all these
As I hold you in my arms.

Why do leaves commit suicide
when they feel yellow?