I.
Across the pale blue ballroom—
its plaster chiseled
by sunlight from the sea's
lemony depths—you move
like a saxophone cadenza, a golden
curve of air; and suddenly
the floor is filled with couples
swaying on pointed feet: the swash
of patent pumps, the click
of spike-heeled sandals.
I lounge in a light-filled alcove,
my fingers moistened
by an icy highball, waiting.

Star-fire chills the bedclothes.
Her love-worn body turns, frail
as a cockleshell. The distant
voice that distances is hers; hers
are the nerves that web the air
with Andromeda's frozen hair.

I made you wait, she says.
Shall we walk along the pier?
We cross the boardwalk, she leans
against the rail, and she turns her back
against the blazing sea.
Her dead eye's cocked. Beneath her skin
the cold machinery of bomb and gun
wait for my hand to spring.

II.
I am sitting in my father's chair
of glossy calf and brass studs,
casting a long shadow
from the balcony door. My fingers
thrust into the scruff
of the dog's neck, and the curtain
swings heavy and stiff,
scraping the sill. If I turn
I will find you behind me, I know,
sitting with feet spread
like a child's, a fingertip
circling the glass's rim
between your knees.

The pages of the sky
creak. So much has moved
out of mind in this colorless heat.

Light, like the light from a pool,
touches your face,
dull and forgotten
under the dull braids. My aging hand
rests on the leather
like a pink conch. I am thirty-two.
For hours I wait
watching the knob of the open door,
believing things change
and yet return, unchanged.

There is always the filigree
and carved Medusa's head
of the doorknob. And there is always
frost blurring the windshield
as the car rocks over the white ruts
in the land of glass trees, my hands
aching on the wheel,
and the silence of this bedroom
sharpened by the panting of the dog.

You sit and gaze, your skirt
lifted to your stocking-tops,
your bitten finger
rubbing your sweaty breastbone.
Then comes the repeated jolt
of railroad cars
to where I breathe alone—
thrown into sudden cold—
hearing a stranger's cry, dying,
across the street.

III.
Nekropolis: at first dimmed
by rain haze then all edges blunted
in heat swirls, the stones—
of whatever stuff the moon—
are cold now in the flowers, are cindery
bone now in the fine aging of grass,
hip and thigh compacted now—
glittering salt-streaked hulls
foundered now.

In the pits marked out with string
the delvers tread with care
and the overseer squats
in the shade of his hat
with his calipers and heap of heads.

The hill is littered with broken
aloes, stems like ship-spars,
fat leaves split, impaling and impaled,
and a mule nods under a basket
of barbary figs. Oars balance vertical,
and the beak—the bow-wave fluttering under—
rips into the other's frantic tiers,
and the helmsman, thus jarred with his pole
wrenched from the pivot-post, leans,
kicks, hits the sliding wake.

And the fishermen carry him—
wrapped in the nets that found him,
not touching for fear of breaking
that stinking bag,
those limbs swollen and boiled—lug him
up the shallow steps of the town;
and the girls are quiet now
as the sun falls, their faces
blurs of terracotta red.

As the men clamber past
with their strange haul, I see your
face in the shawled crowd of watchers,
and I see you now, Henut Wedjbu,
alone on the cliffs crest, your dress black,
your legs the color of pine boughs,
your eyes a deeper blue
than the forgetful sea.

IV.
Brown as the lizard
on the sky-washed wall, black
as the rock crouching under the grass,
white as the sea-bleached tree that sand
has locked, she drifts from death
to life to death again, again.

And in the blue ballroom the powdered air
casts about its vortex, whirlpooling
on a pointed shoe of silver brocade.
Beneath the Grand Hotel
the water utters
its dark crustacean syllable.