The lindens along the gravel paths
chatter and froth,
dark green, lime-green,
more longing,
here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris,
than anywhere else on earth
(though this you can’t have known,
you who in Île-de-France
yearned for Africa…)
They haunt you, these everyday
lindens, but you move on,
desire bending you toward the exotic things
cosseted in hothouses
or caged behind moats.
You stray from the gravel path,
take your chances in the labyrinth,
attentive to angry blarings from the elephant rotunda,
half smelling the hot lurk of lion,
the feral sweat of tiger
escaped into the boxwood hedges…
But all goes well today. Safe through the labyrinth,
you come to the winter garden,
where your eye will gorge itself
on jewel orchids and cattleyas,
succulents with fleshy leaves,
banyans and baobabs acclimated
in clay pots to the botanists’
chastely ordered
concept of the tropics
specimens, all,
neatly potted, pruned,
well-fed, and Latin-labelled.
But you see Africa and Mexico
in the curve of an acacia leaf,
your eye releases in each plant the wildness
it had half forgotten here in Paris.
Here, in the winter garden,
in the ecstasy of the eye on its object,
desire leafs into its own:
these pods, bracts, stems,
the twistings of these captive roots
suffice to feed the yearning that inhabits you.
Outside, the optical clock chimes in its kiosk:
noon drops its plumb line down
through lens after lens,
refracts and tintinnabulates
light into sound:
order, in the prism of your eye,
reverts to art.
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
(after Odilon Redon)
Tremor of watercolour, tremble of the saint
sagging in ecstasy against his tree,
long white nakedness bondaged
to bare blue bark.
Arrowed with desire,
quivered through and through,
he shudders against his birch:
the woods flood with purples
pitched higher
and higher, mauves fusing
into lavenders, rose, molten
golds, the air keening
as his flesh flowers into light.
(after Henri Matisse)
The world outside exults and effervesces,
the sky, through your window, a strident smear of crayon,
geraniums rioting through your wrought-iron balcony.
In this room, though, time stills to a trance of desire
and you, in your thin silk caftan, dream,
his letter in your hand. Perfumed
and ready in the silk that whispers
lasciviously along your long white body,
you dream him in the earth colours of his flesh—
eyes lips nipples engorgement—the tendrils
in your own groin growing damp, your breasts dewy
with sandalwood, and that other dew
forming in you already. And you wait
by the elegant, the implacable black door
through which he will come to claim you,
needing his touch to unspell you
from the vegetative rhythms of desire, release
you into the June day raging in the garden.
(after Edouard Manet)
In his evening dress,
he’s the dark
of the painting,
the sombre, light-absorbing foil
for Nana’s luminous undress.
Propertied, he appraises her,
eyes level with her rump. Cocks
his cane, his cardiac stare
on the opulent flesh blooming
below her strangled waist-
One
