Her Tone

This spread of middle-day –
this grand repast – you needn’t beg
the girl to let it last – she wants it to,
quite on her own. Suggestion
of her tone: a shredded cotton clouded
sky alerts the eye with soft but bright
gradations of too many hues

between the ones we’d choose
for milk and those we’d opt for
in an 1890s belle époque cream silk –
the lady spreads her panoply
of soul as if it were a ruffled satin
stole above décolletage
so pale and faintly eggshell –

pink? no, gold? or beige? – so something
like the brink of an enlarging
stage of womanhood which
now upends, distends and otherwise
extends the brazen white
of debutante seduction into something
like an assignation’s stolen light:

faint swoon of afternoon, an August interim
of an exacting delicacy one might rather
have expected from some early June –
but now she brightens like a dragon
waking up and rends us with her
muscular voluptuousness
like a phallic whip – too thick

to undergo without succumbing
all at once. Abundance of Our Lady
of Transvestites, Manahatta, sweet
compatriot of all the sinning lovers who
still hover ghostlike in her perfumed
sweaty reverie – one seeks again to rhyme
abyss with kiss. Whatever gives her bliss.


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