At three o’clock she unlocked the door
in ratty boxer shorts and shift,
redhead of swirling islands.
He’d been gaga over her
matchboxes,
her beeswax miniatures.
The Charleston breakfast porch
smothered in flowered degrees;
he’d brought a fun-pack of poems to read
and swallowed cheap foam.
Her shadow porcelain, Elizabethan face,
she sipped warm water,
bent his eyestrings.
They drove her crumpled Volvo
to her fabled studio and kissed
in the street before stumbling
up stifling steps to see
her sculpted boxes:
ancient sheen and soldered iron,
daguerreotypes and antique pages,
a stratified dust. Drinking
raspberry framboise from flutes,
candles fluming, they listened
to a bar thrum below and sat
on a red velvet settee. Her palms
were full of amber resin,
the mystic cross.
Granite and peach,
they navigated dawn
and drove toward her windows
arched in the gray-green light of March,
her bedroom’s beckoning hay bales.
Pulled farther than eyes
might see, a struggle began
in short, oceanic breaths.
