Green my Flesh is, Green my Tresses

His is an autumn kiss, wet and smelling of rain
and blackening leaves.
Our dance begins toward evening.

Over me
he is a crouching spider
giving his venom—
silence over my throat,
his gift of drowning.
Green—he wants me green as death,
as the ocean-water,
as his ghostly face raising to the surface.

On the kitchen table,
a vase of flowers like spectral faces.

He is a knife in the skin,
a root in the soil—poltergeist
stealing the color from my eyes
to fill them with his own frozen silver,
leeching the blood from my veins
to give me new ones, green
and brittle as wallpaper.
My body is a flower, feet like petals
and I his stem, unfolding.

My hair like sailors’ knots
and he a Davy Jones—
in my eyes the dark ocean
with which he floods my throat.
Green my flesh is, green my tresses.

I am a snakeskin shed and green
like so much old blood.