- Non-Erotic Poetry
- Perhaps By Then We Had Been Lovers
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By then my posture was traversed by you
Pretending to be a sculptor like Rodin
Revisiting Despair, only,
Not reclining, not nude,
More in the manner of
Dora Maar’s photograph Male Nude with Drape and Orb
circa 1935
By then your fingers
Were rayed elements of infatuation
Pointed in the same intricacy as
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
unfinished in 1923, still.
Viewing Duchamp’s work in the Holocaust Memorial Museum,
It seemed you were behind me
Now at high speed in five planes.
Perhaps by then we had been lovers.
There is a photograph I keep coming back to,
you in a purple cap and gown
Covering your luminous nylon carapace,
Stopped colors on white paper,
The image on an east-facing wall
So it would always be the last thing
Dawn would dip to light.
In the background
The peony’s bright flames bloom.
Today a rage of daylight
Calls to mind the friction in it –
Evening unfolded above a field of stars
So blessed with motion
The very hem of night withdrew.
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