The Girl Who Came For Poetry
The Girl Who Came For Poetry
She was the fury of midnights no one sees,
I saw her waft through my marshes
(a drying stain on her blue sundress)
to taste the words that fell off my lips
every time my room reeked of poetry,
she came with shoe flower perfume
and sat across with eyes large enough
to be filled with my words, let them leak
into unmoving water with twisting colors,
like a rainbow that forgot to stretch taut
under the leaking beams of a lost home
where memories come to forget humility,
sit on paper like stubborn black forts,
raised letters to read with closed eyes,
she kissed them until the edges confessed
all their umbrage, all their fierce yearning,
and something broke in her then
with a sound she wore between fingers -
she knew the riots I lost old dreams to
but needed to hear them in my voice,
close her fingers around my messengers
and shake their nightmares over my rug,
and something broke in her then,
her eyes suddenly on marble elephants
in the darkness above the sooty hearth
as if to wrest away all rhythm from me,
from the ankles of inexorable tragedy,
and recede to the world beyond my window,
slow winds in the vacuums behind her feet,
She was the unspoken word,
ice-crusted trinkets left to thaw
and she will not come again.