I watched her writhe
Under the milky light of the moon; her
Diadem shone white-silver,
And a garish necklace draped across her shoulders:
Between her bare breasts
It tasted metallic and glistened salty sweat,
And her dark skin reflected a piece of moon
Back into the sky and back toward the white television screens,
Screens that stared a hole in the balcony with blank eyes from black windows--
Screens that were oozing
Money Rich
Against the windowsills.
The stars shone with a feral zeal
In the galactic night which, whirling madly like a Dervish, tossed from
heaven spears of icy light
Onto our concrete city.
The woman, slow like the night but fast as the Moon is to the Sun,
(But dripping wine and slurring poetry)
Groaned on her great chair--
Her Egyptian throne--
That overlooked the
Western edge of the Earth,
The final border of my beautiful country,
And the last sea in which we may discover our sweet green mother.
With warped eyes she gazed to the bay which she
Glazed over with a glassy calm:
In her nakedness she was clothed,
For if she were clothed but for her crown and necklace
She would have looked nakedly and dumbly into the
Glaring eyes of the dark--but she did not--
And so she was The Night;
In heaving a breath of hers across the bay
A wind stirred and swept away across the earth and down the coast
To fill the homes of men with her cold Lust
And a god’s touch.