Lioness

On this night, all the while listening intently to her breathing

and the way her heart beats as we cleave together,

I have set my lips upon very much of her;

although perhaps it is imprudent to say this

when considering the jealousy that may arise at my privilege-

Where I glance as she bleeds from playing music through the night

and around her thumb the seeping red has the taste and scent of a strawberry;

but at a moment in time when violence, pestilences, or storms of earth or air

have made strawberries impossible to purchase, even in massive marketplaces.

Where I stare when les autres offend her and fail to appreciate

the danger of rousing one who wields the knife of a butcher, skillfully,

even while drunker than a stone has ever been;

or as she plays a particular variation on a minor chord that evokes Seville.

When once gouges rippled in deep furrows like sand dunes

over my shoulder-blades, she soon stopped where she stood, noticing this;

her grin became as summer days when lightning strikes the sun

(I confess in this memory I generally remember her unclothed,

though it may be that she was bundled in preparation to trudge in snow,

tawny scarf spun ominously about her neck, a swan shaped unlike a swan)

She said, “What will you tell the next woman about those, when she asks?”

I replied, “I will say, ‘How is it possible that you do not remember

needing to put them there, mademoiselle?’ ”

She shook her long blackened hair and her irises quaked in accord,

(And if there was a God of Power then this world could not exist thus,

where the oceans of her eyes do not display the hues of all flame)

and she laughed and laughed but I saw, a divination in glass and smoke,

the day in my future when I shall be a blind man sitting in a wicker chair.

These dreams and fragments of the past, I kiss (leach) from her fingertips

as she sleeps with heavy blankets strewn across her body, socks still on,

her hand half-curled in beauty just above her collarbone:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

I brush my mouth behind her earlobe and (vainly) whisper-

a rose, my love, its bulb flowering

in the dark of an autumn night,

need only be brought out

when one wishes to tempt the thorns.