Soap
–Robert Wrigley
When I consider the worn, petal-scented bar of soap
my lover inadvertently left in the deep woods,
alongside the river we camped by for a week,

I think first of watching her bathe there,
how I waited with her towel in the sun, her clean clothes
warming on the radiant stones.

Then I think of a man not unlike myself finding it,
a pink and botanical soap, in a perfectly scooped dish
on the back of a large, water-polished rock.

He senses her in the curve and slope
of its undoing at her skin, and holding it
to his lips he takes in some faint but vivid

scent of her, stepping clean into her towel and my arms,
which now are his, and who then, unable to help himself,
offers the soap’s pale astringent underside a kiss.

Photo by Kristina Balić on Unsplash