Red Mango
I haven’t the heart just now to flay your skin,
consume your flesh; you are too beautiful to eat.
The rose-pink dawn of your skin conceals your
molten gold sweet flesh.
Your shape has taken possession of my eyes,
those tireless hunters of the beautiful.
I gaze at you as I would a small exotic bird,
smoothed down in warm red plumage, your
underside dulled by care, as when a mother-bird
incubates her eggs.
Shape requires touching, and weight is
the surest proof of substance.
In my hand, I stroke your skin, smooth and firm
as a lover’s breast; sensations rise like mists
from ancient dawns, awaken my hands and fingers;
words burst from my mouth like tropical birds
taking flight as poems, my mind drinking potent juices,
eager to taste long hidden sayings, whispers of lovers.
I spotted you in a woven basket among green
mangoes still struggling to maturity and ripeness.
You, though, you have already achieved it,
bright and confident as a bougainvillea,
glowing like a dwarf star, a living heart,
so that I was forced to stop. I heard you as a cry
as from an orphan torn from its motherland,
where hills rush upward like great drafts of wind,
offering paeans to blue skies and mountain breezes.
then rushing downward like melting glacial rivulets
of happy laughter, from distant shining snows.
Tomorrow I will eat your flesh, make you part
of mine. Your sweetness will expand in my mouth
like morning light reaching to awaken edges
of distant green dormant fields, and for a moment,
we will be one, water with air, air with wind,
wind with clouds, life with life.
Beauty is not the eternal quest of aging poets
or philosophers but a momentary spark
in a world of raging winds and dark storms,
spring flowers of a capricious day – scented,
heady, fragile in the crushing shadow of existence.
And, then, like the universe itself, a mere
fluctuating image, lost in the empty skull of Time,
the eyes of an eternal hunger, its gaze steadfast,
patient, waiting to consume us all.
Copyright ©
Maurice Rigoler
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