My Love as a Mannerist Painting
January 2, 2022
No deposition
No embrocation of limbs and loin
No lachrymal traces cooling on the zygoma
No lips to brow
No, suffering’s over now
No arms but to release and commend to the ascent
© 2022 Amélie Frank
Elegant Universe
I never did find out what you thought
when I spoke of the aftertaste of
the astral particles you left on my lips.
You were angry when I spoke,
too angry to feel the
fluttering in my chest, the expanding
irregular galaxy of the of the left ventricle
when she became a sphere,
an apple, a nova, a ticking metal shield
pinging your name in contraction.
That was two years ago.
That was the last poem for a while.
Such are these kisses we find
so hard to pin down in tin turns
riparian residue at the bottoms of hopeful pans.
When our lips share a common
point they are never quite coplanar,
more the nervous waves in filament
that mark the neon grids
that never quite hold their shape long enough
before collapsing into Lichtenstein
into the end of the war
into the watchworks of your amygdala
into an eruption of tropical origami cranes
into those two hawks glancing off the thermals
before our very eyes that afternoon.
How can you say to me that you are not beautiful
when you are the sunlight bending in
17 different angles through the leaded stained glass;
when you are the homecoming, the sugar-shell peck
on the lips, when you are the lower half of
Spiderman's mask as Mary Jane peels it both up and down
before vestiges of the Persid storm
like tear salts on the lower rim of her mouth
find their opposite polarity in him?
It has always been nothing but impossible geometries,
mind-blowing footage of a circle that becomes
a scroll effect, a vortex that might hold martinis,
a parallelogram of wishing, a trick of dimensions
you can visualize while I cannot because your mind
is all numbers, machine language with a good head of hair,
and I am just the four sleeping chambers, the breath,
the gush, the amplexing of two primary colors,
the next breath, a Pantone swatch
of everything and nothing.
How can you say to me that you are not beautiful
when your eyes contain the glint of delight
carried through generations of the boys of your tribe;
when the tragicomic dualities of your face are seeded into
the family helix alongside survival, genius, and
possibly light espionage; when the desert shades
of your skin radiate heat, duty, fatherhood,
and the longing for silence, for proximity to water,
for the reassuring hiss of the seas
as they receive newborn alloys,
molten, perhaps even extraterrestrial?
So much beauty there.
So much of the microcosm that coats
my tongue when your name pauses there to rest.
So much of the three small lizards that Escher
drew into our path that afternoon,
like you, their skins indelibly beaded with so much life
like you, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
© 2022 Amélie Frank
Bio: Amélie Frank has authored five poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Art/Life, Lummox, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Poeticdiversity, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Levure Litérraire, Poetry Superhighway, Cultural Weekly, Wide Awake, 1001 Knights, Blue Arc West, Edgar Allan Poet, A Month of Sundays, and Voices From Leimert Park Redux. She has featured at Poetry in Motion, BackStory, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, the NoHo Literary Crawl, Library Girl, Inspiration House, MOMA, LACMA, even Hooters Café. Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center and the cities of Venice and Los Angeles have honored her activism and leadership in the Southern California poetry community.
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