Persephone Reflects


I often get confused. Are these the white
petals of daisies or butterfly wings?
I get confused, not because I cannot see but because
signs point in both directions.
 
Death was more beautiful
than anyone remembers and it was Sex and Death at once and
not only sex but the end of my girlhood so,
at once it was Sex and Death and the End, the end
 
of a place where all signs pointed in one direction.
 
Here there are butterflies, petals, words flutter in dark light.
All appears negative, bluish and orange around the edge.
Caught between love for the Light and love of the Dark
I get confused, as if in two places at once, I shine darkly.



Image


To wake, to describe music, she thinks
“This is so moving it feels as if
something is coming loose in me.”

To wake from the ship she drags
from canal to canal over wet cement,
fag in her mouth, her husband and lover dead.

To wake from her stood at the late cart,
a dark man selling candy or a pill with syrup inside.
Some woman of the night leans by and says,
“Darling, if you knew what happened
when I took that last,” as she swallows the sweet, sweet…

To wake in the glass canal light of an empty street,
worn grain of the wood of the deck on my cheek;
the doors of an empty city float by
as if in a dream, her life caught
between my mind’s eye and the careless lip of reality.



Oracle


The photos are lost but he tells her of one with the light
slanting in rays through slats of old wood in the souk.
How much of her life will never be his and still
sunsets descend on medinas inside her bottomless…

Fatidic train windows in which she sees her reflection.
Why is it that light in so many countries behaves
in this unoriginal way, hoisting her face
like a flag over distant lands that she does not own?

“What can be lost in death?” he inquires at Delphi,
if it will be sleep, falling with her in his arms,
a dream like a painting through which she crosses a field
toward a river, stops as the clouds break, turns…