“Tell me more quickly
what I lost by this....”
(William Empson)
In endless undressed summer
we kissed with the same lips,
shared the same secret,
slept in the self-same dream:
The cream and music of her skin
is an aria in heat, coloring and
flushing,
blushing and cooling, turning
burnished
copper in the sun.
In immeasurable tryst she sweats
& glistens like a harlot at full
gallop,
twisting and arching, murmuring and
squirming,
burning luminous through the
night....
Who numbers how long a while it
lasted--
how many suns & moons, how many
comets and eclipses,
how many solstices:
It is an opera of two characters in
search
of welded flesh, with spacious
entr'acte
in equatorial Africa, horned and
prickly,
voracious in hunger & lioness'
bloody lipstick....
How long was the
desert night and cold sand,
with rattlers and
scorpions under darting feet,
dancing the
self-same gypsum in one intoxicating beat:
It is the ballet in which the
ballerina first discovers hips,
snaking locomotively under the
severest, gravest star,
animating a sandpainting
diagrammatic with hourglass hours...
Does anyone know when winter came, when
music fell
frozen to the snow?
Which physicists, which mathematicians
name the cosmos
where self-same twice-born near
invisible smile persists
through burning eyes of ice?
E. A. Costa 3 January, 2015
Granada, Nicaragua
