BACK AND FORTH (i)

Last night I helped Veronique to sew her face on.
It was intoxicating; flawless and fresh.  Her old face seemed
unappealingly rough and wrinkled by comparison, lying folded on
itself in the city of glass bottles beneath her mirror.
I then helped her shed her clothes, followed by the first layer
of her skin, the unnecessary shallow one.
She sat beside me in her freshness.  We found her little
box together, hidden at the bottom of a drawer of unused linen.
We stroked the little cube, we passed it back and forth between us,
admiring its design in all its clever detail.
With whispers then came our sex (which was magical.)
The umber drippings on the walls mimicked our boneless motions.
The room expanded and contracted with our breathing.
We would have died together then, in the unity of wet oblivion,
if only we could have.  Death, however, turned discriminating eyes
away from our naked conjugation.  Death clutched his endless self,
suddenly nauseous.
There were others, though, who watched with anxious salivation
from the window.  They smeared their offerings in fluids on the pane 
where they became the language of frost.  They stand and breathe the
effects of our sex through the glass membrane, swallowing our 
elixir of sweat and scent.