Forty-nine was your magic number.
Forty-nine this.
Forty-nine that. Forty-eight
Doors in your high palace could be opened.
Once you were gone off every night
I had forty-eight chambers to choose from.
But the forty-ninth – you kept the key.
We would open that, some day, together.
You went off, a flare of hair and a plunge
Into the abyss.
Every night. Your Ogre lover
Who recuperated all day
Inside death, waited in the chasm
Under the tingling stars.
And I had forty-eight keys, doors, chambers,
To play with. Your Ogre
Was the sum, crammed in one voodoo carcase,
Of all your earlier lovers –
You never told even your secret journal
How many, who, where, when.
Only one glowed like a volcano
Off in the night.
But I never looked, I never saw
His effigy there, burning in your tears
Like a thing of tar.
Like a sleeping child’s night-light,
It consoled your cosmos.
Meanwhile, that Ogre was more than enough,
As if you died each night to be with him,
As if you flew off into death.
So your nights. Your days
With your smile you listened to me
Recounting the surprises of one or other
Of the forty-eight chambers.
Your happiness made the bed soft.
A fairy tale? Yes.
Till the day you cried out in your sleep
(No, it was not me, as you thought.
It was you.) You cried out
Your love-sickness for that Ogre,
Your groaning appeal.
Icy-haired, I heard it echoing
Through all the corridors of our palace –
High there among eagles. Till I heard it
Beating on the forty-ninth door
Like my own heart on my own ribs.
A terrifying sound.
It beat on that door like my own heart
Trying to get out of my body.
The first next night – after your plunge
To find again those arms
Arching towards you out of death –
I found that door. My heart hurting my ribs
I unlocked the forty-ninth door
With a blade of grass. You never knew
What a skeleton key I had found
In a single blade of grass. And I entered.