Mexican art mingles with Mandalas next to the blue nude.
The suppleness of her back stretches beside another picture
of an uncased violin astride a green velvet chair.
I imagine graceful fingers touching the strings to Akhmatova's
if you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly.

Her work is on the kitchen wall next to Moreau's symbolism
highlighting the space underneath, an impossible idea-
how things have been misplaced, stolen, erased.
I notice absence: the frame bought from the supermarket
before he arrived in that grey Italian jacket.

The lapels, I thought were exaggerated like over-stated
aesthetics, perhaps misunderstood in the reprimand
pointing out subtleties are not always as deliberate
as the photo on the stereo, the one where his face is indistinct

but a blurry Jesus with that bleeding bulb of a heart
appears almost behind his shoulder blade.
The mirror reflects his ponytail, his thick sandy hair.
The photo has disappeared with other precious things:

the card of an androgynous man kept on the hallway
wall can never be replaced. I want to know why the mystery
has been destroyed, if there's any grief without censoring
how dark sky becomes when placed between pale cotton sheets.

When I washed them, when I was tucking them in,
I saw him on the edge of the edge near the thread
of a thought expressed as an underlined sentence
with an arrow drawn in ink.

1.)

Does the aura of a blowfly
wake with a sweet taste in its bodiless mouth
because fortune-telling priests no longer read steaming entrails
spilt by the sacrificial beast?

2.)

Without the drama,
I remember bourbon soaked lips
searching the catacomb for worship
darker than bohemia.

3.)

An indescribable scent
descends Plutonian water, leaving the Oracle at Delphi
blind, deaf and numb under obsolete
messages of marble.

5.)

It's enough to make you cry over Tarot cards positioned
one to ten in the Celtic Cross
of mysticism, right here,
on the dining room table.

6.)

Predictions never vary the shape of stones
buried in each godless word hurled,
but at least you
wrote it down on a piece of paper.

1.)

Outside the window without curtains,
branches bend prowling words.

2.)

I can't sleep

3.)

The noise reminds me constellations are fingers
poking holes in starless eyes abandoned near the borderland,
the road where suicides are buried,
where darkness has no name.

4.)

He was born to Maia. She's both nymph
and night. His father is Zeus, the rapist.

5.)

Hermes has no place.

6.)

That tablet of stone is a hoax.

7.)

I'm frightened.

8.)

Science and alchemy,
the flight into the arms of Hades
welcome flickering shades of ambiguity.

9.)

It all depends if I dance with bare
feet till I'm dizzy, sleek with sweat dripping
down the back of my legs.

10.)

The truth is, I
wear high-heeled black leather boots with mini
skirts in summer.

11.)

The days are clearer than stolen music
stuffed in someone else's suitcase.

12.)

This is not an omen.

13.)

Hermes.
Why are you such a liar?

14.)

I've seen the eagle circling the sun. It watches
the woman bathing in the river.

15.)

Her name is Aphrodite.

16.)

She's all alone.

17.)

Her sandal disappears without a trace. If
she searches for it, she'll lose
the feather on that godless trail to Hermes.

18.)

I'll lend her my boots.