Snow and gold and the
sudden dark apocalypse of a
female professor’s room.
Fewer books than bookish,
but heavy tapestries and tired dogs.
The tapestries block out the light,
warm the freezing rooms with
a half century of smoke and drink.
Catholic black and bloodstained
ruddy browns, here and there
a relief of mangled blue, thread-thin,
recurrent, rare as laughter.
She forgives my jaunty atheism
and I, her chaste and wasted beauty.
Her low vernacular rumble is a
noise like larks or thunder,
her eyes spill, and spurn, and mock me
when I move too near.
Her apologies are manual or mute,
an aesthetics of brilliance gone insane.
Beyond her room the real world sleeps:
crumbling, dreamlike, without walls.
The winter clouds are gray and urine-gold,
a humped and curdled reservoir of fleece,
infested with rain and senile harmless gods.