#120 The Palace of Curtains, III

I
see the
sky reflected in



this single word
you've left
me.

#119 Le Musée d'un Nuit

It is
an over-
night stop, a
motel of
memory,
where some
of the guests
have the
provenance
to dis-
play them-
selves &
others
stay hidden
& wait
for room
service.

#118 L'Eternité

Everything that looked
on turned
away,
even
small birds
whose eyes acquired

only outline, not
the detail.
Fear
frays
the hem-
line of eternity.

Who
comes to
save us now?

#117 Les Fleurs du Mal

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre
Charles Baudelaire: La Beauté

Sometime
I must check up on
why the statues
of antiquity
had no pupils. Would
have been easy
enough to do, a
drop of paint or
use the chisel as
an apple-corer. In-
stead left blind.
Deliberate. No need
to see who calls. In-
duce the dream of
flesh beyond the
stone through
flower wide open
& eyes wide shut.

#116 La Belle Idée

I start to tidy up
the tapestry. The unicorns
worry me. Not the one
all gleaming white &
shiny-horned, it's the
other, the one with
the shades & lycra bike
shorts who's lurking –
can unicorns lurk? – who's
hanging out then, there
by the castle gate,
waiting for some corn maiden
to come tripping out
on her way to the
fields where he will follow
& (impale her)². Only
just then the Lord
of the Castle comes
riding up with his entourage
who all have earpieces that
drift down into their
chainmail & steely eyes
that scan the crowd, a-
lighting on the unicorn
who pretends he's looking
at postcards in a market stall
before sliding back off
into the background &
back to his nighttime job
in a porn theatre where
the prurient masses pay
to watch some corny maiden
get impaled by a quadruped
with a condom/inium on his head.