Her eyes are lidless,
And the joy of life has left me:
Those hesitant beats dinning in my ears come too late.
Strands of her hair sway in the morning zephyrs
———And salted sunshine
I, a failed pneumatic, would have drawn my fingers
———Down that luminous line from her fuzzy crown
———Along her spine, where she sits–
———What a Picasso might have limned
———At the dipping of his hand.
Those crumpled sheets she’s pulled up front,
———And lidless eyes–having seen me,
———They do not see me anymore, only
———An open window, a vine wedged
——————-In the pane.
———The air: a hot bath
———The trap: a summer that trundled too long.
She’d said No a hundred times,
But at last, with the night, in the rush of fiendish impulse,
———Came drunken, fleshy swells.
Her eyes, deep pools,
———My mistake, a stone
———Plopped at the surface;
——————-‘Went down, down
Why did I do it?
The ant on the sill,
The screeching gull—
An ant at the rim of the bedroom bowl
———That sped us
———Around and down in a Coriolis swirl.
But the passion has died aborning;
The whirlwind dropped its load.
My fingers twitch in the dawning light;
My lady shudders.
She is cold.
This poem was first published in Typehouse Literary Magazine‘s Issue 10, January 2017. Copies available in PDF (free) and print at http://typehousemagazine.com/archive/ and Amazon. Issue 16, was just released.