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Personal Profile Even if but light refracted by a warmth of skin, the complex blur of colors tracing the outline of her tilted head, suggests, as warping star-beams do, a core of lightless gravity. With careful grace the line is drawn out from the fiery thicket of her hair and downward—blue eyelids closed, wet lips apart, round chin held high—directing thought downward, along the long curve of her throat. Behind her luminous silhouette a window offers options: a languid pastoral of dappled slopes and glades; a chilly grey-green seascape; or scorched rock sullen, rubbed on by the sun. The world reflects her swoon. To what does she surrender? To the swarthy girl tugging her coppery hair with a wicked brush and comb, tickling her ears with coy obscenities intended for voyeurs behind the arras? To a memory that quickens in her like a cramp? To the ancient blade of flint poised near her incomparable breast? To the slim and subtle angel, his dirty joke promising pangs of love and birth and death? The vessel's empty. Cranium, thorax, pelvis—all three void. The window's shuttered, a square of slate scratched with the broken arcs of turning stars.
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