We met at night,
back-alleys black
with the scent of heady rue,
my eyes attuned to ruby glints
in the timid stare of death.
Behind a neon sun
I found,
standing in a skirt of webs,
a child’s and a woman’s face
impressed upon the wall.
There she hid since time remembered
by but the spiders and the stone,
grown-up, gone out
to stand behind
a dive-bar’s spoiled name--
her own, a sob,
a lullaby and sigh,
bespeaking thirteen years of monsters
and seven years of woe:
that darkling child known
throughout the slum
at eventide as
circumstance’s bride.
My name she knew
and sang it by the veil
where drunks forsake
libation
and red wives say their prayers--
my moniker, wherein
she traded all her cares
for the fleet and fading hubris
found in gentlemen’s affairs.
I wrote within her shadow
in inks brewed from defeat,
stamping all my letters
in the blushing wax of grief,
all the evening and the morning worn
on strings of worthless stone
chiseled from the faces of the Magi
and the thrones.
In her name I scribed the ages
and did them up with pearls,
I wrote of many devils
that damn but other girls,
erasing words of war
and the records that they made
out in the cratered country
where old men man their tombs.
There by my heat I taught her
of where the towers fell,
when heaven burst its borders
and repossessed high Hell--
I showed her on the maps
writ on messiahs’ side
where empires are dancing
and where the gods may hide.
She asked me of the authors
and of her next of kin,
of whom I had no record
but the history of sin,
which I did tell her in the songs they played
when Weimar fell upon itself
in that California way.
She listened and she sat
while I told her where it’s at,
the rhyme and reason of the Father
who kisses us with flame,
left dumb-toned to tell her who to blame--
I turned her from the ceiling mirror
and absolved her all her shame.
The morning shed its holy shine
and sought out her fair spine,
lithely genuflecting on the linens where we lay,
it denying us the darkness wherein
ghosts and priests do play,
entreating shallow worship
from the guilty of the night,
where we groped for karma
and distilled eternal life.
