Ken Meisel. “Pictures.”

Pictures

There you are on the bed, curled up, legs
crossed languidly like rope sensually braiding
itself, reading your book about photography
in the 20th Century in the city landscape,
the cashmere sweater robed around your
body, holding the whiteness of it in, lips
red, the soul blood of you, pure as flowers,
and pearls spilled down into your cleavage
making you resemble a concubine out
of Manet, one of his models stretched out
on a divan, ready for the painting, and here’s me,
standing over you, my quick instant camera
in hand, snapshots while we are young.
Your smile, an enterprise of bright light.
You think this was years ago. No, it was
just last week, and the plum trees were full
in bloom, the birds hiding there in pines
were out of breath with singing, the street
noisy with children riding their bicycles,
all the world around us, crazy with spring.
Even the neighborhood, so quiet all winter,
had come to life again. People, faces pale
as turnips, coming out to say hello again,
the root tubers of people, men and women
stretched alongside open doorways, talking,
drinks in hand, cigarettes dangling, laughing,
and the Polish man with foreboding in his
eyes sitting there on his porch, smoking,
talking to himself again about Krakow.
About a life there, and a woman planting
a garden full of red and white flowers.
Her eyes wide awake with swallows.
You there on the bed, a bouquet nude.
The voice of a man, you ask? It is a broken
string full of unbearable literature. This is
what he would tell me as I drank there
in the dense summer evenings with him.
And a woman, you ask, she is a salvation, yes?
She is the richness of the upturned earth,
her eyes wide awake with sudden swallows.
She is your garden, yes? smile on his lips.
She is your earthly delight, yes, your how
do you say it, pearly everlasting, and you
are the light, what she will see of herself, yes?
Take pictures of her, he said to me, his eyes
mixed and incongruent, foreboding, dark.
The dangling arms stretched over legs,
blue squiggly numbers inked there on wrists.
Eyes the color of coal in outdoor ovens.
You are young once, just once, raising
the liquor to his opened mouth, sipping it.
Me, lighting up another cigarette for him.
Take many pictures of her, many, he said.
The world is rabid, yes, but it is good,
it is always good, and hungry just once,
your gut so tense with the hunger of it,
and your wife, yes? she is how do you say it,
enchanted? yes, she is that word, that, yes.