swift, creeping cat, bellying
lightlessly across
the backyards by night
a Cimmerian shadow with dun
short-haired quickness
not
so easily
caught
along the mottled sidewalk
the bounds of the city blocks, cast slight
beneath the dappling yellow of the
street lamps
a coloring
almost unseen ( for its own sake,
unseen )
a feline faith
dining on mice heads and rape wine, and
long adapting
daydreams
desire but bits and baubles of unfettered
fate
free and stupid to winnow its own blue
ambit and way, its own quirky
arc
blue guitars tuned with cat gut, oh
strings of mouser stomachs and bladders
twisted, tight weaves to
seized and
plucked
notes
( by fingers that once strung the
bow )
Mid-life street woman from red town
she was...I grew up with her under
mango trees now softly drooping
their shoulders much like hers.. but she,
still contoured like a Paul Gauguin urn, is wrapped
in arms lovely in flesh and heat: fanned banana
leaves swaying to samba notes while cooking
fried bamboo roots; her fragrance buzzing along
summer's exotic beat. How she then pinched
my cheeks with her tapered fingers still
pink on veins floating through her quivering
body…
Somehow, she gave me this epiphany of touch;
the slow wave of body rhythm lightly fondling
the rosiness of my adolescent skin. If i knew how
to pivot in the wakening garlands of Latin
steps, it was her ample hips winding and bellying
in nights and morns of her own wanton sashays...
Oh how I long to climb her mango tree,
her waxing then waning shape still blazing among
bursting seeds of female treachery or finery.
I tell myself, there is no age when her fire sways
in places where tropical eyes dazzle with her
near flowing, soaking limbs…so tenderly
wild because she, Livia, nymph of the forest raw,
has nothing else to lose.
©
for Debbie's Women, and SKAT's Poem #2
by nette onclaud