Shivering from wrinkled autopsy to humpbacked kiss.
Fondling the Catsgore jailbait beneath the cabbage-
colored skylight. In the moment’s fracture she appeared
to look away, harlot in youth’s bloom, delighting in her
lewd white music. One is made thirsty before an innocence
this hard. A wounded alphabet’s closed circle.
The pop of a supple cork. My eyes hollowed a
dry hope: a slow, a heavylidded child, deadringer
for a drunken familiar unbuttoning herself in the
raingray silence. She removed her bloodstained gown
with a vampire’s rain-rehearsed, unconscious ease.
(The libretto encourages some overacting in the death scene.)
As far back as sepia, whalebone, antimaccasers, bindings
on novels and disobedient wrists. The edifying germ already there.