Medusa is not a Monster

One reflects a certain way on the gallows, doesn't one? The livid heat of poinsettas in sunlight. A circus of sorts, a museum.

The body at times such a grotesque architecture, all we want to do is look away. She tells me to stand and cry and fear nothing and I try, I really do, but it doesn't work. We go slowly into each other, days pass without breaking the connection. 

A calendar is a kind of trap. Imagine his last breath, imagine the light, imagine the dreams that came after, countless narratives twining into skeins impossible to unravel. The poem is limited by what I can see and imagine.

Deep laws attesting to love. Lake water chimes a little as it collapses against the pier where we stand in a light rain, not speaking. Medusa is not a monster I have ever feared.

Watering down the whiskey to make it last, when that's still an option. Writing standing up, half-dancing to Blondie's Greatest Hits. I remember they found Twister in the attic and took it down laughing but many of the adults in the room were uncomfortable once it was set it up, there on the floor, actually playable, looking at it in a way that made clear something bad had happened, something they could none of them risk happening again - I saw it, I asked about it, but nobody ever explained it and here I am. 

Paintings of lemons from the seventeenth century. Ice yet on the eastern face of the mountains. Those angels and demons you collectively banished did not die but merely wait, endlessly patient on a dark and unnamed island.

This is how it is now. I slip a hand under her shirt, my thumb circling her nipple, and her eyes close and she leans into me sighing, a loveliness that can be neither lost nor gained.