The light behind her head, the bright honeycomb of the sky

At night his long body works above me,
late into the hours that make themselves
from dust, crafting the landscape out of midnight’s cloth,
pulling Stockholm from behind the moon,
its blue skies rendered in Delft ink,
the cobblestone piers that part the water
at its glistening seams, and then the summer
evenings on the Hudson, a New York
he’s making in my legs now, those runs past Ellis
Island, our lady of liberty swung out
beside Tribeca’s ragged shoulder,
her fragile skyline shaped with dusk’s gold filigree.
There are the deaths that terrify me still
because they have not happened yet. He’ll wash
them from my eyes with Japan and all her
colored scarves wrapped around the limbs of trees
that forget themselves in blossoming.
Like the flowering corset that is the world
doing up her stays each morning, shaping
herself again to hold us all in semi-precious light.

Keetje Kuipers
The light behind her head, the bright honeycomb of the sky first appeared in Ellipsis Magazine, Issue Seven, August 2006.