Lucifer in Starlight

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Tired of his dark dominion ...
—George Meredith
It was something I’d overheard
One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously
 Saying to a mutual friend, a woman
Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips 
  That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always 
Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country
 Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me 
As being a city of the night ... ”
  Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant— 
 Not simply because I love
Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening 
  As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky, 
The whole mind of night that I know so well
 Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite,
Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome
  Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen 
 To live when I grew tired of my ancient life
As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness 
 Was of the kind that consoles so many
  Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history 
Of falls ... No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark
 Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur 
Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of
 The She-Wolf—all the sequins above in sequence, 
The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians,
  A dark like the polished back of a mirror,
 The pool of the night scalloped and hanging 
Above me, the inverted reflection of a last,
  Odd Narcissus ...

  One night my friend Nico came by 
Close to three a.m.—As we drank a little wine, I could see
 The black of her pupils blown wide, 
The spread ripples of the opiate night ... And Nico
  Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost
 Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look ... ,”
And deep within the pupil of her left eye,
  Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging
 Lantern rocking with the waves,
I could see, at the most remote end of the receding,
  Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway, 
At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil,
  A tiny, dangling crucifix— 
Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting
  In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain ...
Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing
  Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid 
Kaleidoscope washing over her—the way any naked,
 Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip
  Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly 
Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly
  Love of sexual sincerity ...
  I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember 
The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let
  Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather
  Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind 
Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents,
  Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves; 
The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling ...
 Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere, 
Then forever ...
  Into the mind of the Roman night.

© David St. John