Through the young and awkward hours
my lady perfectly moving,
through the new world scarce astir
my fragile lady wandering
in whose perishable poise
is the mystery of Spring
(with her beauty more than snow
dexterous and fugitive
my very frail lady drifting
distinctly, moving like a myth
in the uncertain morning, with
April feet like sudden flowers

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like—

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws’

gesture of menace
and power. A gull’s
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
—size of a demitasse—
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer’s firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this—
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

You like to fight. You desire sweat  
and snap of bicep,  
thick resource of thighbone,  
shouldering aside obstacles. 
You like to thrust your way in and find 
something hard and real to go up against— 
call it a wall, call it 
your brother. Call it the angel  
who came to wrestle 
but was forced to bestow  
a blessing. Strength is a woman  
with her hand knotted in a lion’s mane.  
Yours to claim or disavow.  
I wield no gun,  
slingshot, nor lightning bolt.  
Only the memory  
of membrane and synapse, 
how you once had to belly-crawl 
through my very body 
to get into the world.  
I live in you as beauty,  
call it spirit or flesh, 
call it a swift elbow strike  
to will the wall DOWN 
that separates—let mine be the blow  
that wakes the castle 
from its dream of parapets and spikes.  
Let mine be the courage  
of the trembling tongue 
that confesses its true need, 
so you can lie in my arms, a cub again 
at last, a sheaf of immortal flowers.