The mistress holds many secrets,
not just the corporeal of clandestine sex.
She collects clues in nature’s trails
in bleedings
slathered like massaged love potion of entrusted lives.
And trust there is–not to tell
while the other reveals:
all sorrows and aches, disappointments and joys, dark desires and flighty fantasies.
She swallows words with their heartbeats inside her body
and emanates fumes of lust as interpretative salve.
She is whore-preistess.
A mistress locks like a safe.
Her world shutters in space
like the smoke-stale, nylon-curtained windows of a cheap motel screening daylight.
Her misty spell casts doubt and fear, longing and dread.
Will she tell?
She is harpy-savior.
She can tell–
how hungry he is for affection, how desperate she is for care.
She recognizes the drift in the gaze that lids evanesce in the throes,
orbs inward facing a racing heart of agonizing desire, painful pleasure’s release.
She is spell-casting springtime.
She knows the cards that contain the house,
which ones can be plucked without disturbing the structure,
without crashing down the careful construction.
Sentinel at gargoyled castle keeps,
she is creator-dragon.
The vault she is has no combination.
Her honesty and trustworthiness stare ironically into the abyss
of human heart relation–re-kindling the rhythms of lie and sleep,
walking and waking,
truth and destined failure to hold neither an eternity nor a lifetime.
She is prayer.