now
the memory
of your body
cleaves to each curve
filling me.
Your kiss
...is a primal thing
that lifts my soul
sobbing.
in the aftermath
glistening
feeling woman
rise from my loins
infuse
my form
with soft - made
bliss.
then, am I
your Beauty.
(curtain falls)
Do I say too much?
Do I rend the air with thick images when a
gossamer silence fills ?
Does the torrent of named beauty / formed energy
bruise a hallowed kiss?
Oh then, dear Love, I will be still. I will wait.
I will tremble. I will be led to a bed of white
sheets. Whiter than tundra. Whiter than the
fawn's breast. Whiter than a silted dawn. Whiter
than light itself —
and I will yield ...
to the Hunger.
(curtain falls)
Burning in a still place
I turn from you.
Even now
your image
recedes
remaining as you do
on the stone platform
where I left you.
steal without effort
into my past
it is unsafe now —
a whisper , a breath
some... sign
pushes you, deep
deeper...
Splayed
in remnants
still
unable
to let you go.
(curtain falls)
(houselights up)
(exit...)
Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in Ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but so was Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.