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werewolf
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the younger man is dressed nicely,
the tie red down his white
shirt like a crusader
but his leather jacket
browning dappled
like old parchment
is his dress coat,
and his derby hat,
not inappropriate by itself,
sits in an agressive
newsboy angle,
and is gray,
a newsboy in the fog.
and he waits next
to the older woman as she gets coffee,
like an impatient child
at the mall.
but he is tall and handsome
and has gentle
if deferring eyes
that are still like mercury
tethered,
but would ripple asunder
at the first contact made
with them
his eyes would be the focal
point of whatever visage
he took on.
she mentions
to the lady at the cash register
that he is her husband.
and she clings to him.
a dilletante of compulsive passion.
she is dressed in
a black fur coat
that strikes out
like an oil spill
of midnight
and
the overstated golds
bracelets and adornments
the rich must take on
to separate themselves
in a society
where imitation is only as flattering
as hostile,
and is only bound by practical economy.
she lets him hold the laptop
as they find a table.
at night perhaps he lets her
hold warm
almost real
the power of her youth
nostalgia hard enough to press
against it
when she closes her eyes.
as a lamp put on the far
table and not the bed table
sings out an unending stream
of dust light
like a small yellow song.
but i am perhaps wrong about them,
my estimation of them.
i have failed to mention
that her hair is the most beautiful
i can remember seeing.
the black coat is not there
for consistency but contrast.
her hair
still a black
beyond artifice
could be a myth for night,
could cover the sun god
as they lay.
a flock of raven quills
from the chiefest ravens
threatening to pull or push
the world in,
a dark confederacy
singular multiple strange seeming
and her eyes are
sharp stairways of blue
with a pulsing
black planet, a gravity
at their cores.
the ocean that looked
at every coastal
giant of civilization
now looks at me -
and her eyes and her hair
woven in like seams
draws me for a moment into dreams,
and i cannot say
i wouldn't follow her
all that is certain
is that her beauty
stands even as it fades
and makes any life she lives
forgiveable
and any love she gains
somehow earned.
over and over, time after time.
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041209
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