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Persephone’s Celestial Sphere
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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Persephone’s Celestial Sphere For Catherine Imbriglio Moonlight pools in her hollow bones, quicksilver slowed to lead, liquid mercury’s indolent poison loitering in the marrow, cooling, collecting there. It silts her blue blood viscous, clotted, thickening to immobility. “I think I was a daughter once. Some flowers stained my hands I can’t recall.” Night tarnishes her breath to pewter, lead alloyed: darkening, and flaking off in air. She shades her eyes against glass morning’s tangled branches, wind plays drying leaves with no sound, equivocating between shape and shapelessness. “We speak in shadows here,” but no one spoke. She knows his voice by now, his hand pretending to be a cloud passing between her sight and sun. Eclipse becomes his proper name, but she won’t call him that. The yellowed light begins to fray, disintegrating distance, discontent (the lower the observer, the higher and more intimate her visible horizon). A shift toward orange skims across, then thoroughly blood red (having the longer wavelength, greater patience weighing on her): his violent beauty of composition producing form from vista, or she remembers hers. 7 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 7 The apparent surface of the heavens, against which the stars and other bodies (ghost moon attending bleeding copper) appear to be fixed. If he were a hand he would open five petals, offer these snapped-off starfish, iridescent beetle carapaces, stippled eggshell tesserae (smashed glass bits, lapis pieces), rusted sprays of pine straw. “Here are some things love might be.” Becoming shadow hampers him, keeps nowhere well in sight. The sky he alters alters him to crows just now arriving for the winter, from the north, a fog over black mountains she can’t find. Her eyes close to the repetitious days, blot out the excess color. She calls him smoking water, he calls her flower face in no one’s voice. 8 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 8 ...