You've loved other women, but none have been this sweet;
don't expect to get those thorns out from where she's been.

She's sweetly topped with a thickening of purple
leaves crowning sticky sharp greenery, an upsetting
upraising. You can imagine her perfume: a stillness,
a newness, a powdery brightness that permeates the places
where girls like her grow--under concrete bridges slathered with
graffiti, her girlfriends both common orange-yellow weeds
and shiny minxes in baby blue bell bottoms, the real flowers.
It's okay to be caught in between, spending her evenings
sleeping in the sunny outskirts of town while the train roars
overhead. You can love your roses, but she's the type
that catches your attention first.

And if she's mistaken for prey by a smoky eyed wolf-rabbit;
mixed, becuase of his lupine jaws and sexual deviance of men
older, wiser, more experienced than she--because of the way
he runs a fingertip from below her navel up to her tongue with such
light in his eyes, because of what his father did to his maman.

He talks about devouring her, like he could almost
understand her vibrance, her amethyst glow. The feeling of
sinking in, skin gives way to something he's never known--
and how could he? Before her, he'd only lived in hell.

She's always known exactly just how to love her forest man,
with his sly mouth and needy hands. She'll be his mother, his wife,
his little girl with wide docile eyes. He's thirty-two, and she's
as old as the newborn grass, as young as the silky blue azure sky.

Her tall firm legs are stretched from here to eternity, sprawled
on her familiar dirt and seed sanctuary. She's a Southern particular,
and nobody could look so good, dripping honey from her fingers,
eating her thistle blossoms like they're candied gold.