I
Hobbles and lockets I knew nothing of.
Covered with fleas and yet a faint smell of citrus
on her skin and hair, scent that would have made
even a more chaste moment bearable. In a public WC
midway Somewhere and Someplace Else,
we found a stall and clasped each other’s strangeness,
going about it in the usual stand-up way,
awkward at first, till her high heel missed then found
the toilet seat and with a single click of arrival
our allegiance blossomed. Afterwards, I stroked
her hair as she sat peeing, jabbery with never the chance
of an edgewise word. At the navel of the noisy cross
she motioned east as I turned west. Her profile
and a smile, her eyes less open than before.
The curve of her sharp satin vest, a portion
of her left breast I had not tasted and now,
in another station exactly the same but five countries
over, a truth to last forever.
II
But suppose it to be otherwise, crumpling the page
and recomposing from the revealed. Each new page
would be an ancient riddle and the foliage of a
trembled text shimmering for not-yet-ready eyes.
Caressing her stockings of permeable silk,
she mocked polichinelle in my eyes, coming open-
mouthed in spastic beauty. To interrupt her private
Byzantium was sweet rebellion.
III
My Circe was ……… who, then?
A corps de ballet of possibilities, rustling just offstage.
With this withered paw, command. An agent back
through time, sent to probe the ashes, sniff the sheets.
Turning up the rare truffle in its loose envelope of moss.
Take a load off in the anteroom, while you wait
on the collection of your fee. The wall is peppered
with trophies, some bagged and some not, with
fewer celebrities than one might have imagined.
Until one considers how the anonymous rich remain
that way. Trust a thug as far as you can throw him,
pennyroll for brains, a bedwetting Achilles, mama’s boy
till the snapshot end.
IV
On page 3, a diagram of possibilities.
Fairly brutal characterization, with requisite formlessness
and very little detail: something at the most
about the color of the eyes.
Betrayal was a sweet thing to which my eyes were
blind. To never see the undertow of things: Kinglike, Oedipal.
As if desire were embodied in her and her alone,
imprisoned in the taut blank shine of the mirror,
stretched in the swan-key of B major.
Only that most secret of secret pleasures: disappointment satisfied.
Like Rimbaud’s faun seen full face,
through bitter tears her smile was one of comfort,
her words a junkie’s hard-bought calm: I am not
the echo of any voice but my own.
Monteverdi swelling in the distance, voices under glass,
the ceiling of the arcade letting in drops of light like crystal.
A moment drowned in bells and a fat man jolly in his red suit
and all the gods of Winter hung down their heads.