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Title:
Alchemical Breast Fingers cradling the river within your fabled mouth I have slept curled like a bloom of inverted organs, wrapped around your tongue. I have pulled out my veins to feed you, ribbons hanging down the back of your throat, have emptied myself to merge with your flesh, and tangle, like roots around your core. Tiny black birds with venom in their sharp onyx beaks rest upon your eyelids and stand guard while you sleep. The river engulfs these hands sifting through stones to catch a serpent bearing the children of death. Catching opals now, to elude you with reflections, holding hearts cut open to catch your streaming breath. The black birds rustle, wings shuffling the house of cards, foretelling your future self. The serpent arrives with glory golden encircling its head, uncoils its dream of a body to drop thorns into my hands. Down your throat the serpent travels, another ribbon, this one burning and wise, orbiting the veins I have already let fall, spiraling hiss and blood around your void. Fire building temples and great domes in which you will awaken to the rustling of books made of wings and berries dangling violet burgundy from the thorns I planted there. This river knowing neither end nor beginning, luminescent as a shadow in disguise, crystalline but murky still with secrets and heavy with dreams. One by one the blackbirds leave their towers and follow the river’s curves, seeping fortune’s cards in their poisoned milk and longing to reveal. Down the shadowed path they echo timeless and despairing, burdened by the weight of what light you are to be. Folding wings against the others, in their places on the checkered board, deep within your bleeding fountain with a house of cards to build. © Patricia Cram 2004
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