Her Private Palimpsest

Some Gifts in You

Surrounded by her own exquisite static, she can’t
know she is the grand emphatic countenance
she seeks; she is the vatic muse she yearns for;
fractal – split apart and driven into fairy-stories,
strangely turned and curved escape routes

from and to her riven cartoon heart – she trusts
in nothing past a dreamily remembered sense
that she has lost her indispensability: and yet there
is no more delicious sensibility than she; she has
the delicacy, shimmer and extremity of grace –

and brutal sharpened claws that she withdraws
so that she won’t disfigure any unsuspecting face:
which – oh! – be sure she could, and would,
were she to feel the least soft provocation –
flee to questionable freedom from the sharp

electric sparks of her stark self-imprisoned station;
she is safe as long as she insures your safety
through her absence, through an underscored
extravagance of absence; with intolerable secrecy
she etches into – quickly smoothes, reuses –

her one waxen page – her private palimpsest,
a poetry which nobody will ever see:
involuting through the furling leaf-like phases
of her own mortality: certain something bleak –
unspeakable – beyond the haze – is her reality.

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