You have that violin face Cheeks held in and strident A pizzicato When you laugh You imagine Your mother lost her arms In an undefined post-industrial accident But it is just the way she sits In the shadowed folds Of voluminous robes Romanesquely disappearing Made of all those dead butterflies The velvet hammer blows Of half-drunk pyrethrum Wears a beauty mask, most evenings The grey mud of warfare Steam rising from the endothermic heat Like Botticelli’s Venus From the mezzanine Crowned in smoke Where you harshly inhale and expel In quiet disequilibrium, looking on With a jackanapes grin A hollow sound in your chest Of trains slowly leaving
