The World According to Narcissus

Her. But not her. Her. N.'s whole world
was broken down like this,

into the women he would or would not
have. With some, it was whether

they had the kind of beauty
that cauterized eyes, the one hundred fictions

of it, like chokeweed that could root
anywhere and begin to thrive.

With others, he measured potential,
their ability to slip from contemporary cotton

into cocktail shooters, a brown sugar backstory
that could start, say, in a cornfield,

aroused by a little subjugation, verbs
he'd take a shine to when he'd single her out:

lure, charm, exhaust, burn. Either way
it had to turn. In the beginning, peonies.

Eventually, gasoline. When it did turn,
he'd weigh the baroque/throat

rhyme of her beauty against everything legal,
find ways to unbecome it, an elegance

he'd chip away at and have, and not have, and have
until it was a broken thing, a bird unwinged.

Until she was a ghost.
He did not have an eye for ghosts.

Teresa Leo
Poetry
Volume CLXXXVI, Number 3
June 2005

Copyright © 2005 by The Poetry Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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