Cheshire Cat

To kiss the winter is to kiss bone-lips--
to hold her is to make roots of one's fingers as one rolls in one's grave.

In my dreams, a succubus,
singing to me in crowsong;
an edge to open the blood borders behind my eyes.

Does all of this seem grim?
Let's do it on the hard wood pew,
and in the after-talk, soft and easy,
I will pull a bloom from the hymnal of my mouth, a song that has slept
and now stirs just to describe itself to you in octaves.

Once, dressed in scales of shell-pink and green,
I roamed the years like an exhaled breath,
searching for the dark-haired Queen of my dreams.

Summer found me gloomy, draped in leaf and binding,
and so she made a gift to me of her indifference;
In my hidey-hole I wove it into a flag, then burned it.

I kissed winter on her bone-lips then,
and breathed jet-colored smoke into her body--
from then on I saw her as Nubian, and beautiful as an animate jewel.

Cheshire Cat, she said,
behold now, nothing is left of you but your smile,
enchanted by me, the nothing of me, the waste.

Deep in my root-tangle, I imagined hanging gardens nodding with abundance.
Shocked with cold, I resolved to become a furnace, and fed my own flames.
As for winter, she knew a sucker when she saw one,
and laid down with me in our somnolent abatoir of illusion.
_______

for Kerry's FANTASY mini-challenge at Real Toads.