Book made in collaboration with Wesley Stringer.
You: from a study in colorlessness to a field of moving color
Where black is still; white is quiet
And the heart — a black grape beneath black skin —
it rests above long blue single legs,
Where thighs have thin waists,
and knees have blue eyes.
If Picasso were to paint you,
I would begin to see how much you really do belong to him.
I feel far and lonely
as when knowing you'll never reach your resting place —
Her neck, her breast, and all of the other places on her
Which are dark, deserted of sun
Eyeless, so as to see none of the vinegar in sight,
I move like a mother-of-pearl mare
Have the sound of silk brushing against itself — the gentlest.
There is unending light here:
In the mirror glass,
which is such a separate substance
from shell, tuberose, and the other colors
That are barely here enough to have names.
Eyelash to its lid, lid to its crease — all of it feels ice-bound.
Water, like silk, falls from her eye:
tear-wet threads,
long as the wait for dreams and sticking soft
Fragile as unbound feet.
Pearls in a hand
have the quality of transforming that hand —
Until the fingers, themselves, become moon-hung orchards
Where children sleep,
and dream wild jasmine into their hair.
The rest of her breast nests,
the corn is in its silk.
Her belly, small and soft,
holds all of the sugar moons in June.
White as the day of poornima in Western India,
With its donations of rice
and women, wrapping threads around the Banyans.
On her waist, tambourines of green mandarinas
While her leg-into-thigh —
a gazelle, ghosting in the white cinnamon.
The column of her — it is a river of girls.
Cold as time, cold as months
Snow-candled, and wet with doves
Which, when put together,
they form the Moon.
Then comes the poem of her long fingers:
Pale-palmed and pink-tipped
Spiders slipping off their silver webs —
locating hair as they might an ear,
And its perfect parabolas,
figured from the flightpaths of birds.
She, herself, has become the act
Of tying a ribbon in a mirror.
The stars — she picks them with her fingers,
holds them in her hands until they have hardened.
Like clots or corpses,
White necklaces or rings
which once circled a prehistoric planet,
kept all of its moons in sequence.
Here, there is no need for her to dress
since she will be in the dark
And she knows —
there is no dark that is dark enough
To hide her silver tails.
