Issue 7 | Summer 2010

Sacred Love

The trees practice it
all winter—the honey

locusts, with their spiritual
thorns, their dry pods

of sweetness,
the death pale birches

like bony priestesses
and the deflowered flower

girl plums, naked
and wind-thrashed,

in bruise colors.
But, what ascetic hermit

can resist disporting
when April unbosoms!

one of Vermeer’s women,
dressed up in such lush

tapestries, lavish embroideries,
brazen perfumes—

Filed under: Poetry