Does the color mean something?
Leaching from your eyes, now copper, now coffee grains of day
turning amber
once you were green fields, swaying new corn
budding beneath yoking sun
remember? When movement was an oiled limbering dance?
And turning to a lover, you wilted in their gaze
heat climbing your throat like a jeweled snake
you were immeasurable, lost in the bosom of a flower’s center.
They don’t watch you now, with those piercing turns
they don’t see you anymore, they eat themselves blank
eyes like dried raisins, hearts ever darkened
you set sail on Conrad’s* doomed boat and never embarked
losing yourself in the ebony solace of pressed night
where paper-thin hands and failing eyesight becomes drowned
by the murmur of the sea – spreading her vowels
like Saties’ Gymnopedie III. Lente et grave
or the gentle turn of Velvet Underground’s vinyl
poised in sonorous Nico’s chocolate onyx tongue.
Would you stay faithful to me if you saw how
I looked, rubbing cream beneath my intonated shadows
lifting flat breasts to the light, scolding antinociceptive thighs
for their disobedience, nettling the sonant marks of
life into splayed mosaic? Would you choose me over
the nymphette, the orator, the crowded room
sweating years like a viola woman chased by her hunger?
It snowed that day, your scarlet blood became my pigment
I saw it in the shroud of moon, the furl of branch weighted
with ice.
Does the color mean something?
Or do we shadow our souls, yearning in crushed dates
and papered roses until you, standing
on the opposite side of the tracks, biding
to board a train in different direction, wave
madly and without limit
your burgundy lips broken in great grin
calling my name over smoke and belch
of cresting metal and vapored chess carriages
delight blooming on your urgent face
just like it did when I said as children
I dare you
and together, we jumped.
*Josef Conrad / Heart of Darkness (a novel).
wonderful writing! Loved it!
“Sweating years like a viola woman chased by her hunger” is running through my mind hand in hand with several of my favorite Surrealist paintings. Thank you, dear. 💜
I never pass up a dare! 😉