Her Knowing Smile              


The heavy cloying, semi-sickening closeness
of honeysuckle on that hot and humid night
hung its sweaty sweetness like cooling cane sorghum
drips in spring. His angry self-serving verboseness
echoing stentorian spousal shibboleths of right
and wrong, filial dereliction and indecorum,

crinolines and freshly brushed hair flying, trying
to catch up, she disembarked their solemn pledges' ship.
Her slaver captain's clanky chains, his impotent
upraised hand, the rage that masked a prowess dying,
propelled her from the house to yard and night, a trip
more to than from. After unfulfillment, against somnolent

unilateral disregard and unrequited passion,
her undiminished fire escaped coition's cul-de-sac,
to anywhere. She strode into her garden's perfumed wall
of scent, decrying fates' abusive sexual ration
as amoral and unfair. The moon diffused the black
until the weeping willow, its bridal veil a call

to step within, had wooed and stopped her rushing.
The arching branches, their bowing lacy fronds
a queen's boudoir had made, whose honoree complied.
Despite the tumultuous egress, deprivation blushing
its appall, an other-worldly quietude, free of bonds,
free of all outside herself, basal needs supplied

within the psyche, effusively, well-being annointing her,
soundlessly called out that she must feel...to celebrate
herself, speed Artemis from the glen, Venus to arise,
the manly eyes from passion's balconade all wanting her.
Without thought, the detached graceful hands initiate
the loosing, the piling at her feet, without suprise

the step away from all that had so recently repressed,
an undressed nymph, a confining chrysallis was let go,
Eve's imago, nimbus its own light. Too tiny to be seen,
each of ten million downy hairs, found its vocal quest,
clamoring, celebrating life, as fervid passions flow
into her flesh.  She moves, a wanton wraith, the screen

of willow walls, behind, glissading down the garden path,
her music maestro playing in her ear, a knowing smile
the finished touch for Eden's newest star. On and on
within the arms of unseen gods who vied for her, wrath
of losers nil, a woman rose above her entourage, her style,
the elegant proportionate de Milo provided gods a canon

for those who'd follow.  Before the dawn, she stopped,
as if chatting, waiting, and held aside the bower's frond
in lascivious anticipating. Passive, she could not be,
but in Priapus' Olympian adoration, passion's threshold dropped,
the endless satiation mounting, ebbing, building beyond
satyric dreams. At dawn she was alone, a weeping tree

her canopy, clasped hands beneath her head, she stretched
luxuriously, the knowing smile in place, arose and dressed.
A consort of the pantheon in passions' panegyric,
who knew those arms, whose wisdom's charms had fetched
from her enticing repartee and more, would never be depressed
again, should dotage husband indulge in his choleric.

             --Don Juan de Feu
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Poems from the Goober Tree  http://nathoo.wustl.edu/goober_tree.htm