We have no graves.
Just the naked truth of our bones.
She was Arcadian. Common as dittany: healing and revealing. Piquant as lemons left peeling to the sun. Slick as the licks of the lunar tongue measuring the isthmus of the night’s cranium to its clavicle, she was the terror that came quick-footed and nimble limbed when owls hiccupped like intermittent sirens. She was climatic. Easily forgotten. Quickly dissolved. Sugar cubes in Absinthe. Smoke over tree tops. She came like a hurricane, distortion like snow on my screen. Like the argot of ghosts and scrying skulls. Something astronomical, like the rings of Saturn, the esoteric entrapment of roots jutting out of stones and stilts. She was the shrinking spider in amber.
She was groves and graves. The wisp of wines, the reason to rhymes. Crisp as cream, dirty as dreams. She was never the end always an interim. She was blue as sleep on nights you didn’t bring her home. The schizophrenic sylph who mapped her body to countries she’d never been. Redolent and swiftly deteriorating. She was episodic, a throbbing volcano about to go extinct. A forest eroding. She was electrical like clouds in monsoon. Hoary. Whore. When she was red she was the ruby rail. She was the scarlet throated devil’s bride with cranberry eyes.
She was hot as a Harlem rooftop. A toxic sexpot. An Indigo palmed, formerly embalmed feline spar. In springs she was purrs and peals: Carillion in a Christian town. She was never holy but always heavenly. Not the bottle, just its shards. The empty sink, the sinking car. She was not a book, just a bleeding page. She was reversed, her age was anachronism. This exploding organism.
She was reviled and revoked. A vamp with a vermeil carafe. An alcoholic arpeggio. Scattered like cinders. She was white as foam but was never cold. She was catatonic. Ironic. The bed, her bastion. She was the writhe in the rock, poured out from the old stock. Heady and hostile. She was the illing love, the loving ill, all the thorns inching inside.
And then she was gone.
(See what my waking up does?)