this is beautiful:

You don't understand me,
you gulp, a frog suddenly on my dinner
plate hopping through the buttered noodles
blinking cold eyes of reproach.

I can interpret the language of your hands
warm under calluses. Your body speaks into mine.
We are native users of the same jangling American.

The casual remark lets ants loose in your ears.
The wrong tone drips ice water on your nape.
Waiting I finger the bruise-colored why.

Look, I can't study you like the engine
of an old car coughing into silence on wet mornings.
Can't read the convolutions of your brain through the skull.

You want hieroglyphs at the corners of your squint decoded
in perfect silence that folds into your ribbed ride,
a woman of soft accordion-pleated wool with healer's hands.

I don't understand you: you are not a book,
an argument, a theory. Speak to me.
I listen, and I speak back.

--Marge Piercy