“
Love is Heaven on a Hinge
Memory enfolds upon her's sovereignty of sleep;
her beauty manifests not as pleasing proportion
but as an arcane assemblage of Ming porcelain,
clues pieced together to reveal
the numinous Yin within.
Tangrams of facile shapes recollect
into priceless chinoiserie
excavated with a toothbrush
beneath the clay noses
of a thousand entombed sentinels.
She reposes within my niche,
an ingenuous vase,
her dreams fulcromed by my lever.
My right arm, her nocturnal tiara,
diademed in jewels of sweat,
perfumed in muskiness and ferment,
heralded in the dulcet wail of snores.
Beneath the bay window of her oneiric realm
frogs belch Chopin's Impromptus,
chanticleers trumpet Hayden
cicadas chirp Mozart's Elvira Madigan.
Under the mask of night my niche becomes
her royal box at the Viennese Opera:
concertinas of Chinese silk,
the empyreal music of limns,
the fateful reprise of heaven
on a hinge.
”
”