I
Now it must touch her. Now the curtain swings
purple and brown, its weave of tawny flowers
rasping her out-thrust legs; the Empire chaise
scorches her naked back. Across the street

the dancers dip beneath the lanterned trees,
and Columbine embraces Scaramouche.
Here, once upon a time, the scream began,
the attic thronged with glaucous shapes of air,

heavy and cold. Her scuffed-up tennis shoes –
worn by some city kid she had not meant
to be – were stopped beneath the fractured laths.
The ceiling burst. The hail of plaster splashed

a pallid scald across the floor. The sky
of stainless steel roared at her – with her – plunged
into her head. Here she had always been,
she knew now, as she clutched the mildewed box,

the stained and ragged letters opening
illegible around her like sloughed skin.
The urchin's mouth was open: "Fix me up!"
Her own voice spoke: "I'm dying to be born."


II
Of course, I saw it all quite differently.
The décor's opulence was all my own –
brocaded chairs, buhl cabinets, swagged silk –
and no expense was spared. Her back was turned.

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke
into the room beyond the looking glass,
where Meissen shepherdesses primped and posed
with white arms intertwined and fingers poised

to touch their open bodices. A clock
flicked its gilt pendulum above their heads,
catching the candlelight. Beyond the flame
that trembled at the opening of the door

her own face glowed. Then mine. The black
noughts of her eyes blinked, curiously round;
the pucker of her coral-tinted mouth
issued a bubble of mildest surprise.

It was not – in the modern sense – a rape,
though he would see it that way. My gloved hand
deftly caressed her shoulder, and she smiled
as if delighted with my gift of pain.

III
His world is desert, and yet – even there- –
the dark becomes four walls, or else the stars
are mere events behind closed lids. In sleep,
he thinks he sees me. Nudged by sonorous chords

throbbed from the deeps of crimson chapel naves,
he sees the stately pacing of the dead,
who turn their cobwebbed eyes to where I stand,
tall in my crown of bones and cape of dust.

He hears the plain-chant of machinery,
no doubt, and breathes the reek of oil. The shaft
goes down and down till even granite fails.
The blood-tiled passageways. The doors. The doors.

Sweating, he stirs to clutch the slender wrist
of morning. Done with prayer, his hands reach out
to hoist her pale blue robe and grope her knee
as if indeed he'd hauled her from the pit.

He wakes to dream a soft mouth in the jug
and in the broken bread a lustful pulse.
Though dawn lays benediction on the stones,
it was not I he saw. Nor is it she.

IV
"Welcome," I said, knowing this would seduce.
All was for her, this land of waterfalls –
pale calcined slithers frozen onto the hills,
pinked by a low sun. "You may use the chaise

there at the window, but you may not think
to move it. Seated there, you will become
part of the landscape that you look at and
That looks at you, the houses' eyes and yours

Forever open." Precious stone. Out there,
the sparrows hovered on stilled wings; the lilt
of polka-music in the lime-treed court
thinned to a single tone. Beauty was all.

And so she sat. And so I looked at her,
tracing the ideal contour of a thigh
under her silk dress and the silhouette
of one small breast against the curtain's dark.

Yes, he would come at last, sand-blind and torn,
lugging his damaged voice. All this I knew.
Yet, had he seen her then, her heartbeat stopped,
he would have seen she never thought of him.

V
When he comes staggering across the street,
the masqueraders will not break their step.
The watchdog will be sleeping, and the door
will be unlocked. We'll share a glass of port.

I'll hear his plea then show him to her room.
The clock can tick again amongst the toys
littering the mantelpiece. The wind can lift
that curtain, and maybe she'll cross her legs

or shift her weight or touch a strand of hair.
"How will you have her? Wearing a blood-red skirt?
Transparent blouse? Or tattered underwear?
The choice is yours. Just as it has been mine.

She loves these props, this bric-a-brac. "My hand,
fat with largesse, will sweep the air, and he
will be dumbfounded. No, there is no charm,
no syllables to lead her back again

into that scabrous attic. She may seem
to move towards the daylight, and so he –
who won't believe her there – will turn his eyes.
I am this place. And she has married me.