While I was working on this second and final tribute to E.M.P.ress' lost locs, my favorite poet was busy creating verse for one image that had inspired her from a previous posting that just happened to be a part of this set. Coincidence? Fate? I don't know. But it made for an interesting entry.
This lifetime you've warmed
no one's feet but idly tend
your tresses, instead of rice.
Yours is the patois
of cowboy and cowry.
You cast yourself from
swings with the planter's
daughter. Later taught her the
letters and sounds. A thing
of light and shadow
you are what the Lady
dreams, in spite of herself.
Kansas straw crowns
a head fit only, some
would have claimed,
for the noose. Yet
that gold Cape, that
outpost of haints is ever
in your rear, if only in a
peeling motif of mud, the
skin of a rail-burdened wall.
Those rails stretch then
pull, stretch and pull
like irons hitching con
to coolie to coon. Like
you, each had his own
passage. Like you, none
allowed his lead body to
plumb Atlantic's abyss, but
crossed. And the alchemy
of that crossing is the
alchemy of you.
LeiCole
