[ANAGNORISIS]

titian’s bacchus barely casts a shadow
perhaps he’s all light 
perhaps he just thinks as much,
flings shades of himself over everything in sight

step back. i don’t know how to hold it all 
without you: 

the terror and the faith; first love’s 
passionate apocalypse
the caprine boy, his heifer’s head
the circumference of the world

for what else should he care?
certainly not the mystery unravelling above his own

here, oblivion too—i wonder 
what good my hands have ever done when not

waltzing round your kitchen a frying-pan staccato
grasping wrinkled folds of baby blue barely-a-dress
weaving skeins of iridescent stars between your fingers

tracing shapes across the small of your back,
every spiral thoughtless and divine