A Majestic Love Song You are beautiful, like...

A Majestic Love Song

You are beautiful, like prophecies,

and sad, like those that come true,

calm, like the calmness afterward.

Black, like the white lonliness of jasmine.

With sharpened fangs: she-wolf and queen.

Your very short dress is in fashion,

your weeping and laughter come from ancient times,

perhaps from some book of other kings.

I’ve never seen foam at the mouth of a war horse,

but when you lathered your body with soap

I saw.

You are beautiful like prophecies

that never come true.

And this is the royal scar;

I pass over it with my tongue

and with pointed fingers over that sweet roughness.

With hard shoes you knock

prison bars to and fro around me.

Your wild rings

are the sacred leprosy of your fingers.

Out of the earth emerge

all I wished never to see again:

Pillar and window sill, cornice and jug, broken pieces

of wine.

There is so much face hiding here

(Whose from whose?)

And at night, to stir with that

Blind golden scepter

In pleasures.

With the weight of kingdom and tiredness.

-Yehuda Amicahi (tr. the author & Ted Hughes)

weather of the body