"Pour La Petite Mort"
first draft written 1973
when I met her at a party.


1.

Desire stops suddenly in surge and muscled
tight in retort by means of sensations not lies.

We find empty room and a vase with dead roses.
Beauty risks nothing. It was that long sky
with bare clouds that emptied loneliness
for the most part. I am inside your skin with
the terror made morning when glory seeds
picked for ashes burn in one final hurrah.

My movie star had lost her movies.
She begged for the lights again.
I found them in her eyes turning her lips
to breathe my skin for motion to light
my Thames reflected by Turner shows
the patience of love as a fire, and rivers
bound inside leap. We swallow ancient
water. We begin to row time against flood.

My love scenes bear with her that nitrate
dust when exploding bombs leak waste
from kisses from scenes that charmed
and are mostly lost. Her photographs
held in an old brown book show the movies
in black and white as they were made.

She told how she fancied poets, and
wished that she was young again. She
said she would show me how much
poets dream when they love. She said
I want to read you every day, but I can't.

I told her. I am old. I am young.
Now, I am almost as old as she that day.
She died in her 90s but I was bound
in her scent. She said "never write
poems about me. You need to write
about serious human things not just a
woman living on the edge of old beauty."

I wrote many poems for her as if to say
she was serious.

Chili completed my eyes and kept my blank
stare open and full; I was her leading man
for several days. We walked in book shops,
and talked about Turner and Picasso, and
how we both loved Matisse and Joan Miro.

Woman was found again. Chili Bouchier
lived in more than nitrates of old films
now preserved in bomb shelters waiting
for transfer to digital media and her arms
gesticulating wildly live on. We watched
one night, my last night in England
brief flashes of her films she had borrowed
from somewhere to show me her youth.

"We will not let them explode," she laughed.
I will carry you tonight to my time and place
and she did when she described London during
the Blitz, fucking at parties, making love in distress.

If you believe in an outer body and inner mind
with spiritual grace and a partial wink of grift
that are Chili and her mad humor and quips.
"She was a tough broad," she said. I didn't care.

In that din we made love in her small room with
her movie photographs and musk. I bent my light
to her mouth in rows of accidental waves. She had
high stepping legs and barely a wrinkle in her face.

I was not innocent, of course, but in love my mask.
She said "your ego will hold you back but not always."

Dorothy "Chili" Bouchier reigned.

I worshiped more than her imagery but her fragrance
of hands and eyes left a stain of more than a deep kiss.
She said as we parted, "do not come back, you need
life, and I need the routine of my search."



END