A butterfly of ash and then
the empty palm, the flame’s blue spine
to captivate all but the seducer’s eye.
The fingers tear across the strings.
Pillowed in fog, the spectral rose.
Nijinsky’s leap swallows the afternoon,
given over to a starlight rhyme
that matches goat to fawn
and thrust to spurt.
Held like nakedness in sun,
to plane the shade’s delighted fall,
abandoning the clocktower’s careful prime.
Karsavina pouts her cherry lips,
skips rope between a nice girl’s
White and a bad girl’s Red.
Surrender spreads its knees and wears
a foolish smile.
Metaphor shows its empty hands,
turns out its empty pockets, and mutters,
sheepishly, of some tempest or gazelle,
hidden by the overgrown flower.
Worse things might happen than to hear
all the heavens, and the earth, testifying at one’s back,
even as the wave floats by, testifying
that the island never existed.
But the blue god, the disinterested one,
turns like a planet, spins in the high lenten air.