We are caught in the moonlight
like classical statues,
bloodless and bone-white.
She says have some, have some,
her breasts flat as flowers pressed
in a memory album, gripped in her fingers.
Poised, she's a statesman debating,
ignorant of the choral singers
that groan in my ear like cats mating
in the trees right outside the windowpane
(my nose and fingers steaming Rorschach)
and before I can turn, she's tamed,
leaning back, askew, head rolling away,
eyes closed but pulsing marble, like she's dreaming
of Rome and raw-armed lovers,
my chorus alive with screaming, now
at each other, Spartan mothers
with rippling thighs, each of her eyes
pressed flat under the lids, ashine
like her stomach, the sweat and sighs
greasing her, and her alone.
Where am I?
Where are my voices? my fever running high?
She is gone without me, not moving at all
in the blue light, her eyelids glowing white,
burning from inside. My eyes are frozen wide,
caught between white and gray
like the diamonds in her sweat
breaking day. Where am I?
David shudders when the tourist girl sighs
in her summer dress, and tonight stoned high
she whispers his name again and again,
grinding and groaning until the end, when
my chorus leaves me without leave,
leaves me with her, mired in honey!
Far from becoming one, we shatter into many
plaster-of-paris others, we become all those
might-have-been lovers, prizes pedestal'd in rows.
And after we're done, she rises
to gather her clothes.
Originally published September 2006 - "Divine"