The old skin turns to nylon lace,
tissue paper, dead leaves.

The streets are lined with pianos
and objets-d'art and tired
policemen. I stand in a tangle
of tram-tracks in the empty
square under the bronze bell-shaped sky.
Your heart is a deep cello-throb
in my ear. Houseless Warsaw façades
are the same smoky purple—
fire and blood. City of no hope.

Under a bannered lamp-pole
a lizard-yellow Indian
is shaking his bell-hooped drum;
beside him a Siamese dancer
spreads nails as long as her fingers
and lifts her tiny heel. The sky
is a turmoil of coppery filaments.

They eased you from your cocoon
and set you, in your frail
brown bandages, carefully on the table.
They knew you were a woman: small
breasts were shaped on the coffin lid.

I hold my ear against you.
The savage dance of blood. The yell
of hollowed tree-trunks. The echoes
of a waterdrop from a roof of stalactites.
Naked footsteps in the temple of Amon.

Brand-new, modique, you pose
behind plate glass. Your Cardin
suit is desert beige; your eyes
are shaded behind tortoise-shell disks.

Chopin's Polonaise crescendos
skyward with a clatter of pigeon's wings.
Headlights sweep the square.
You step out of the taxi,
your new breasts and belly
pure chrome, splintering light.