What’s that?
I say, and turn to see you watching me.
Go back, you whisper, coming close,
lifting my hem a little higher.
Okay…
They were young.
She was French and Indian (through Canada),
but they say she looked like Cleopatra.
It was night,
and she and he drove closer to the stars,
somewhere in the Helderbergs
(there is a castle in those hills, I hear,
built by a philosopher, potter, poet).
The sky, I think, was black and red,
too much, as it were, and then
he raised her hem—
for the universe knew, it knew:
you would have need of me.
—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press