That One Moment (Poetry)

I have heard, or maybe I read it somewhere,
anyway I believe it to be true,
that a man can look at a woman in such a way
that the intensity of that look can make her heart stop.

Or that’s how it feels to her, trapped in that gaze
like a small silent bird, unable to move
because his eyes forbid it and hold her there
as firmly as the strongest arms squeezing the breath from her body.

His eyes move across her flesh and she knows their touch
as though they were fingers, pressing, urgently searching for a response.
It is a small death — a moment where
a succession of past desires flicker briefly

across the screen of memory then fall away,
edited onto the cutting room floor.
It is a moment of terrifying, undiluted awareness and,
if it happens at all, it will happen only once in a lifetime.

An unmistakeable once, when the senses will all scream silently in
unison: this is what you’ve been waiting for!
And she will live and die and come to life again —
all in the space of that one moment.