Caterina, you are champagne
clear and cold as golden dawn
and the feel of you flutters
through my veins, and soars up into my heart:
your well-kissed skin soft as white rose petals,
and honey flows on pink rose petals, oh, you
honey, sweetness, and après-midi light!

I love you, as a saint
with an aureole of gleaming autumn-burnt hair
an ecstatic shining and bright as the sun,
spilling forth with holy oil
with the face of a white-rose angel from Botticelli's brush,
with the heart of a tar-black demon, a serpent in the fiery bush,
a heavy pink blossom all dripping with honey
a sinuous and serpentine moth-silk scarf, fluttering in the summer air.

and I love you, loving and knowing that
I love you, as a painter
loves a streaked and bright tempura paint
here, sun-kissed as a yellow flower today,
revealing its thin translucent colours the next
and I love you, as one can only love
another who can only love a mirror
whether one made from moon-struck volcanic glass
or drawn from the lips of another.

my heart is a concerto
in which Ithaca was but a concrete cage of steely walls
compressed on my heart, and the fluttering concerto grew too much,
and my heart is too much
with my ribcage but a tiger's cage
and wanton cruelty, and living's ecstasy,
and I am always first to arrive and always last to leave--

(et petite souer, saivez-vous?
la nuit, la nuit, je baise la nuit!)

your mother
was a girl with ashes in her eyes and gold in her nostrils
a chain delicate as autumn leading from ear to the centre
of her heart, of the place where our priest's holy incense found its sole purpose.

I just assumed that she
was a wild wanton that ran through the ashes and dust of the
streets of the market at dust, and she loved and did not love
and not loving made it easier to lay on the tabernacle of a sacred courtesan.

we don't have those anymore
they drove them out screaming, naked, heads shaven
as barren and scorched as the desert in their dying breaths
and Maryam, we don't have those anymore,
the word is not courtesan but *****.

but I took it on faith out of love for you
when you told me with fire in your eyes that your mother
saw the face of God in between the sheets of paper
as a maiden pure, the Egyptian lotus in her secret sweetness only God knew,
Psyche drawing back the veil of Isis, looking at the face of her star-birthing lover.

to love you was to look at the sun
and be burned, enflamed, seared into agony and nothingness
and yet to be clothed in the flesh of the sun anew
and when I wore nothing but the star-strewn gold dusk of my skin
I wore the sacred mantle of a courtesan.

my lady is crowned with flowers of saffron
and sunfire gleaming she honeycombs through her hair;
her eyes are rain-streaked as silver-stirred seas
and she holds grace and the depth
of an ivory-blushed wild rose's many petals:
mellifluous fanciulla della mar,
what magic she has, how strange she is still to me!

red ink and red lipstick
there is nothing so red and gruesome than
a fireheart, a bleeding heart, striking matches and flickering
on cold white sheets and with your skin white as poetry
(T. S. Eliot's sighs, Bukowski's love bites, a blush red as Plath)
and your bed is neatly made, and my sheets are a field of unmown lilies
and the creases are pressed out, changed,
scarlet lipstick streaks and crimson ink washed away.

I swore-- like a sailor who's lost her heart to the waves--
you could point to your ghosts
and I would burn them with all of my fierce and my fury
and all the fire that I had.

I wish I was your sister that no name nor space could come between
our fingertips, our morbidezza fingertips like Mandarin porcelain
and the space between our fingertips is the space between heaven and earth.

I call you Giulietta, amore dolorosa,
I plead guilty of wringing and clawing my own heart
and I love you, I love you, I love you, dulcet!
with my red paint like some Muscovy ivory ****** of an expatriate
but you, you're the *****.

I plead guilty to gross desertion
in the face of your tears in the hollow of the night
--oh, I love you, I love you, I love you, I can't not--
toss my hair, fix my earrings, gold against sable,
but it looks too much like the gold of your hair
and I crumble like the sandswept stone
of Ozymandias, of the relics of some ancient love
some ancient had for the contours of the Sphinx
and I just think up more sweet nothings for you,
because every word is a nothing compared to you,
and how I love and love and love you,
but you, you're a *****.