Love Looked at Me and Laughed and other poems - 15. Eighth and Forty-Eighth

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Poem No. 40

Prelude:

To subdue on paper, a grant of words.

To tempt them here, and nail in ink

A seduction of formless sighs,

In tender strokes of terror’s guise.

With fingers so-stained, to it I’ll sink;

The open call of my lover, to grant me words.

Poem:

Beauty take me where the shoulders join,

in the soft valley where one folds into the other

caress me there as I’d never before met

with gentle hand set upon vicious fingers

Beauty subdue me where lobe finds jaw,

where one curve melts to the face’s strength

kiss me there with lips of stony red

and the breath of fire’s own passion

Find a place for me beneath cotton and silk,

where all that moves, is Want’s embody

consume me there to the length of my desire

where power becomes form; and form, its grace

 

On Eighth and Forty-Eighth you’ll find

three building entries with raised stoops,

of old melting sandstone columns

and rapidly fading red paint.

The addresses’ segregation

is measured by spans of plywood

alive with handbills in decay,

and gravity taking its due.

And in a time, some years ago,

I would walk my way slowly past

and consider how I felt there

was something almost wrong right here.

For its dirt and grime can’t make

cityscapes match their perfect goals

when it shakes up the steppers-by

with notions of the not yet done.

Not Beauty, for surly I thought,

she would be nowhere near to this

fairly forlorn, forsaken place;

here was no one but Her rival.

But all those years I walked ago,

those stones like a flint became struck,

and in many ways of it now,

the sparks of that fire still glow.

In the night and on the sidewalk,

Past two stoops and their yawning voids,

I to the dirty third one came

To see in the dark lurked a light.

Some bright angel was for the rent

Wearing a perfect set of white –

But more than his jeans and his shirt,

His looks spoke of his business role.

He told me, yes, he understood;

told me he’d be able to care;

told me all I wanted to hear,

and could say it without the words.

Approaching, he came down three steps

and stood like a Grace for me there

with promise of much more than that

and the sad thought I might accept.

Out of the rectangle of night

his persona molded to me;

to match die-cast to my desire,

he poured himself entirely.

He had the same eyes as Beauty

but their hue was nothing lovely,

and I found in their knowing glow

I could want for nothing if chose.

But I’d choose the endless knowing

of the speechless sorrow in him.

From out a corner of the night

I asked him in my lonely quest

if he could tell which half of me

I’d discovered amiss in him.

He said he did not have a clue

but wondered if that could matter,

for see, did he not there command

the looks of a sweet businessman?

So, for an end of this, I’ll say –

here, now, I feel alive with words,

but what I wanted then from him

sticks with me and makes me ask:

Who can breathe life in me of form?

From which dark corner of the night

might I find the answers I seek;

from whom might I take the breath of life?

Yet I’d choose the endless knowing

of the speechless sorrow in him.

Beauty take me where the shoulders meet,

where under covers, let my hands tease

the crashing planes of muscled forms

with fingertips on easy glide

Let my lips caress Beauty’s ear,

and fill it with my wordless sighs –

of Want in the costumes of air –

not the disguise of speechless worth

Allow me to throw my arms up,

to kiss the nape from lobes downwards,

and know everything I encountered

was put there by Beauty to be found

Postlude:

Can, on the face of this, I lure;

Here on paper draw out for you

The sweet breath of the morn?

When all the pillars cannot endure –

when every sound I utter through –

Collapses onto your feet of scorn?

My lungs cannot secure –

Here exhale for you –

How I was met by that morn.

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