Hello, Julie. It's been some time since I posted here but I keep looking in. This challenge intrigued me so I thought I'd have a go.
What He Wrote?
Dear Ginevra,
spaces spacesbpoetess and writer,
I am the lowly lutist who’s obsessed
with how your verse converts you to a fighter.
Your last performance haunts me—I’m possessed
with efforts to remember all the words
of one sestina I heard you recite—
they burst into my head like savage birds
and cawed celestial love songs there all night.
They’re gone but for one line that beckons me
to seek you out and summon back the rest:
I ask for recognition… why the plea
and why the claim that drew me to this quest?
You said …that I’m a mountain tiger. All
I recollect now is the feral way
you kissed me when you’d left the curtain call.
My very fingers shook. I still can’t play.
I’m baffled that you sought my clemency
for break-blow-burning joy that made my day
unless your penetrating eye could see
into my soul and know, thus kissed, I’m prey
whom you can stalk and maul and kill at will
through that one line of poetry, a tether
that bound me to you then and binds me still,
that means we’ll die in some way linked together.
So, send me, please, the other lines I lack
that I may feel your claws upon my back.
G + H
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