Smiling through my own memories of painful excitement
your wide eyes stare
and narrow like a lost forest of childhood stolen from
gypsies
two eyes that are the sunset of
two knees
two wrists
two minds
and the extended philosophical column, when they conducted
the dialogues
in distant Athens, rests on your two ribbon-wrapped
hearts, white
credibly agile
flashing
scimitars of a city-state
where in the innocence of my watching had those ribbons
become entangled
dragging me upward into lilac-colored ozone where I
gasped
and you continued to smile as you dropped the
bloody scarf of my life
from way up there, my neck hurt
you were always changing into something else
and always will be
always plumage, perfection’s broken heart, wings