The lady’s eyes are an ember of green. Would she take
any comfort remembering vanished dews? Would she care
for a draught of this liquor distilled from cobweb and moon?
Will she bite off love’s brief words with her tiny fox teeth?
Is she parched for the skeletal clatter of lunar rain?
I wonder if she feels I should decipher
the angular pitch of the chamber where she dreams
of a house with many faces like a crystal. Shall we review
the erotics of the knife’s edge? the network
of eternity that howls in the nerves? the memoirs
of a pool rippled by a slain magnolia at midnight?

Perhaps she will recall the ghosts
that crackled in her hair when she shattered the bowl of dawn,
the sinews of wild colts that sang on the mountain in the dawn,
the lone hyacinth that crumbled under her hand
in the mist of dawn.

I wonder if the milk of her ******* is the milk of adders,
or if the flint of her ecstasy chips
the cherried enamel from the basin of her smoldering trance.

Or perhaps she’d prefer to yield
the meteor of her exhaustion to the black sky of night.


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Cop­­y­r­­­ight 2025 by Jon Corelis

joncorelis.com