The Charm Gates*
   or *escaped, and so

We roared up Rue Bourbon and back again,
shaking the gallery shanks with our dancing
feet and fingertips, slipped a thrilling romance
of sobriquets and keeping apart of lips.

Thirsty, she perched me atop her fidelity,
gasping when pinched by the flesh of her neck
in my teeth, our steamy heat-seeking indecencies
churning a chemistry cagey, perverted, and sweet.

I wrung the wrought iron of Isabella's gate
devotedly hanged as enchantment laced
fabled accouterments, pickets and posts.
I dismissed it as ferrous fetish, historically significant kitsch.

And that night she unsettled my incredulous bent,
a disposition I've had hardened and always.
In the doorway, over our sparks, she disarmed me:
"I don't know what it is, you're just so charming."

The ceasefire line dividing us into the confines
of our separate lives defies me to find her,
reminding me she's studded with diamonds,
a mother three times since twenty-nine.

She missed that a revision of spirit occurred,
staked in the mist of coincidence and kismet,
conferred of this lascivious tryst and kissing
against those storied bricks, before she escaped.

And so she'll never know how much I think of her
or what my having met her truly weighs.