000

Ethereal rabbit fur coat

Wrapped gently about your shoulders before

Your shoulders folded in on themselves

And your hair was all translucent gold

Shining like the heart of the void that

Touched your pupils and clung,

A plague.

Then,

Gone were the days of your childish lilt

Lost to pathways of a labyrinthine imagination

You ingénue

You forest of a woman

Leaving men half-cocked, trapped

In the penumbra of your mother’s, mother’s nose

You are petrichor in the depths of chapels in Venice

Where you saw the mummified saint,

Smaller than you were

that seeded a skepticism
you nurture still;
a miracle in the pocket of your
iron will.

That is why he notices your lithe limbs

When they

Pause with some inexplicably graceful motion

Whist reading a novel you’re only half paying attention to

And that is why the scintilla is always enough

Busting up into micro-fireworks all across his brain and chest and genitals

Like vestigial hopefulness

At the end of it all
And then, and so on, and so forth

I guess.