Playing With Fire

-->

Poetry is emotion

Recollected in tranquility.

            --Wordsworth

Upon our exit,

You handed me a souvenir matchbook

With an image of the Virgin Mary

Printed on the back:

            The icon, an emblem

            Of my suffering.

When I asked, you said

You did not recognize her face.

That night, you swam in my visage

Among low lampshades

And velvet sofas.

The dimly lit bar was a submerged ship.

We sat three feet apart

And talked about ions diffusing,

There was no spark.

I took the blessed face in my palm,

Her visage burnished in blue.

I saw her lips slightly part

And heard her whisper:

You can’t fight fire with fire.

So I snuffed it in Ethel Alcohol

And forgot about her,

All the way back to your place.

Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone

Feeding her flock unto the mountainside,

The shepherds knew not,

They knew not whither she was gone,

But after her lover Amyntas hied,

Up and down he wandered

Whilst she was missing;

When he found her,

O then they fell a kissing,

O then they fell a kissing, a kissing, O then

They fell a kissing, O-

The way you ravaged me

Under an ivy-choked Magnolia tree

I recall lost vowels,

Your tongue, your teeth,

Your lips soft and sucking.

A rhythm, punctuated, a Mary,

Falling from grace in the mind of a saint.

It wasn’t so hard to be found.

But in the end, it’s always in the coming down.

I’ve heard it said that poetry

Is emotion, recollected in tranquility.

Here I lay, untranquil

And I don’t feel a thing.

--Alicia (2012)