The Mowers Poem by Ann Townsend

I'm looking at the intersection
of thigh and cloth,
oh at you,
where, caught in sunlight,
fabric adorns you.

Muscles shifting
beneath skin, tendons
maxed out at their task -
you're only scything
the field's fallow grass

down to stubble
but I grow my fingernails long
so they may graze you
and I paint them pink
to glow against your tan -

thigh to kneecap
to the calf's demarcation.
Who knows why
we love each other this way?
Your shout of laughter,

it arcs to me
across the hillside
where I weed away chicory,
other riffs of green
and the stinging

nettle, its rosary of pain.
I press it against my palm
and cross over to you,
bearing a stigmata,
red's rising tide.