Dragonsalad
Christophe Brunski
Easy to compare our souls
To the very first flying machines
Trembling, unstable skeletons
We throw ourselves and each other
Off cliffs and hillsides
Pushed onwards in our actions
By the music of music blaring in our ears
And below our skin
Though with our bodies we are motionless while
Yellow paint and plaster dust
Trickle down the wall like domesticated rain
There is thunder at the door
The pounding fists of the Deus ex Machina
Whose entry we have forbidden
The three of us
She passes to me
As she would a cup and saucer
Her dog-blue eyes
And touches the other's eyelid
Feels it below her finger
Curved and supple yet slightly in retreat
Like an angel's breast
Fragility is ecstasy
A madonna and her sister
Sitting on the bed
With a Modigliani tacked to the wall behind them
The summer is a dragon
With green-leaf scales
And a woman's tongue
Which first deceives me
With promised warmth
Then pulls me into its
Belly of acerbic despair
Around the sandstone neck
Of the statue of the Asian Goddess
Someone had placed a dandelion necklace
A chain of stems and yellow florets
I used to look up at her
From across the cafe where
Ghouls dressed in chains and dreamt in black
With a mystical gesture she widened my eyes
And I, chewing my thumbnail already split from prying open
Lockets full of downward spirals
Struggled to compose a suitable dedication
And despite my vain attempts to perfect upon her silence
Her gentle smile never fell or faltered
Her look of consolation was as constantly unchanging
As the sentences which form the bottoms of
Innumerable
Bodies of
Water
