Private Hours
       

Borges tells of a 15th Century fish taught to weave
in the Netherlands. She speaks an indistinct language
rarely understood.

Can the creature be a fish, for she knows how to weave,
or a woman who can live entirely under water?
Nothing was said of her vulva's briny taste.

We can't know whether she shuddered in the presence
of the priest as he poured wine for the Eucharist.

Mary Queen of Heaven in a sea-blue robe looked on
from a stained glass window.

A word about the priest.
At St. Scholastica, we saw his manhood through the
keyhole—a leg of mutton joined to a purplish sack.

Later we heard this well-endowed man was trotted about from
one lady of the evening to another in houses of ill repute.
What did he do with his gift or curse?

Did the crow devils snap it off?
In the riddle of the Sphinx what has four, two,
then three legs? Two legs of one lover, a three-legged

milking stool picked up at a flea market for a song,
four legs peeping out of bed covers, a photograph
of the Sphinx gazing on with insouciance, an indistinct

language of water mumbling along the docks.
And the fisherwoman—did she marry, at last?
Was she one of a two-backed beast on honeymoon

with little to say?
Sunsets in Cairo or Amsterdam blazed and spattered apart,
naked couples floated over balconies,

aerialists of love beyond a puzzle of countries,
Goethe opined that given the choice of quarter of an hour
of lust, no one would watch a fifteen-minute sunset.

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Copyright © 2012 Colette Inez All rights reserved
from Horseplay
Word Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission