By Nirina Mignon
Therefore shunned by a sickly hiss,
The heavy wingbeat of impish Nyx,
The bind of irons was keyed by sleep’s fickle warden.
In the secretive hour, lovers sought the garden;
Though still squalid with beasts, the castle’s limits grew since being children.
Now as they will, lungs are winded and fill’d with a deadly omen.
In the tempest of his soul, yet the inconstancy of mind,
“I have heard of better lives,” said he, resigned.
“In the silence of my cell, a letter fitted between bars;
I was braced aloft in an innocence I had left unrequited, unknown to Mars
And the spear-wounded traitor’s wageful sacrifice,
Which being rendered, appeases only as long it suffice.
Then saw I the Dove, my confidant and my comfort,
Efface in a violent smoulder my vicious muses which lived on, half-inert
In the ossuary of memory and reconstructed vision.
As sculpts of Daedalus, their forms steadied only to soften under fission.
Their faces were at once fair, then grotesque;
The truth had long dimmed, and now all was at Memory’s behest.
I sedulously sought to trample the fire,
That the changeling of our forbidden love, to hell may not retire.
Then saw I the Dove disappear,
And hatching out of the Moon, Nyx’s midnight coursers draw near,
Smothering the candle’s gaunt and solitary light
With wings as tattered cobwebs, cawing all to their delight.
An impassable eclipse was set by the pale gargoyles,
As barbed lace wreathed around the bars, as a thorny vine’s peduncles.
There was I, enshrined in my cocoon’s entombment.”
A whisper was passed along, to wake a rueful child now indolent;
To a weeping face, not of a man, but stone,
The same who in the strain of breath made Pompeii atone,
And made vanity of the feigned spell of lunula.
It was under Nero, a virgin of Vesta.
The calmness of the night passed into the palsy of confusion.
Though pillars fell, hearts were long hardened to grace’s infusion,
And rupture to the fossil would not once deign
That the inner ruby, light may pierce again.
With a back hunched in languor, roved again the ashen haunt.
Now poised, he lulled to dream poets and their amante.
Under the hail of embers, familiars would they beseech,
Though the triple goddess was calcined to physician’s speech.
Deafened to prayer, in pumice and sulfur was cast Olympus, its likeness;
Lyrics only could embalm the shattered Kypresse;
Once courted as coral-haired and alabaster-skinned in veneration,
She became again the foaming sediment of vengeful castration.
Tonight, we bemoan the sky bloodied, though no Venus was born.