The docile drizzle of young women
drifts through the late room
(somewhere Lawrence’s peach ripens
in your hands).
Clouds of blossom appear in the distance
dawning on the coast of iron and of ice,
Miranda’s island knows the way
to the house of light,
written in the tiger’s blood,
which, in books,
switches on night’s fearful symmetry:
blood tainted by love
out of innocence
and experience.
In the late room,
the peach pulp, English literature wounded,
its stone pressed to Ophelia’s
flowering dress
that heard daggers
and bred lilacs out of the dead land.
Wish for the pomegranates, the figs,
the loquats: do not wish for the glutted,
acute stress
on the final syllable of the longest line.