A Poem

ESOTIKA EROTIKA POETIKA
--for R.M.

Eros the Limb-loosener shakes me again--

that sweet, bitter, impossible creature.

--Sappho

The flesh of the air grows warm
and flashes a bare shoulder
through the lacy tree limbs.

The cosmopolitan aesthete
throws the doors open and,
Whitman-like, slides down
a wet blade
of grass into
subterranean dwellings
where the plush décor
deliciously rationalizes
the most extravagant gambits
of the midmost midnight.

Convex projector screens
of the psychosexual
self reflect a festive
hall of mirrors,
at the centerless
center of which
a pinprick of flickering
light dances with stylish
ferocity to the grooves
of an Italian film composer
whose mistress once
sat on the patio of the
villa ------- in Rome,
her long, intelligent fingers gently
fondling the tingling spine of a French novella.

How is it that a turn of phrase
can change and charge the air
with such frisson,
the pen moving across the page
like the arch Helen winding
her way, black eyes and white foot,
in front of the Trojan elders?

Words are the body’s aureoles
sparked from the world’s spinning,
the fluent real a trope that turns,
like Helen, its gleam of textured suppleness
into a forest of forms and feelings.