Originally Posted by
freckle
i have just discovered julia copus...and what a wonderful feeling such a discovery is.....just like the old times.....
A Short History of Desire
Julia Copus
On a day like today, I think I can almost
begin to make sense of those chivalrous knights
who, on the whim of some titian-haired damsel,
would set off on horseback, although they were barely
out of their teens, in pursuit of some noble
improbable task, while a sun much like this one
strobed through the trees and the left-behind girl
perfected the art of the meaningful wait —
the curve of her breasts and her full lips so pleasingly
matching the line of the coiled anaconda
thickly entwined like a creeper about
her chiffon-swathed hips, the nub of its head
reclining over her naked shoulder.
As naked, that is, as the thigh of the fabled
Victorian gent (beneath the folds
of his peg-top pants) who, perched on a horsehair
chair in the parlour, would catch a glimpse
of his lady-love's finely-turned ankle and feel
the strain of his flesh at the seam of his button-up
fly; was suddenly, keenly, aware
of the fervour of light, how it filled up a room
on a day like today, how it tugged at his blood,
and glanced off the edge of her silver-plate buckle
the way in the Fifties it glanced off the fenders
of a thousand parked-up Morris Minors
under the moon when the sweetest of girls
might take off her clothes on a day like today
to the radio's chanting — alop-bam-boom —
and lie back like a leaf-bud splitting
open across someone's trembling lap as if
just then a knife had been touched to her skin.
However deep asleep you think you are,
there always will be days like this —
a light, hair-tousling breeze and a sun that streams
into the dusty parlour of your heart.
Pray when it does that your heart, out cold
for the winter, stirs in its stockpile of leaves.
Or else, that you're caught off guard by the quickening
thump of your hoof-beat heart returning
from very far off: pray then for the stoutness of heart
to ride with it headlong into a poem like this one
where some part of everything never stops moving
under the light of that big old heart, the moon;
where even the moon up there in its ocean
of sky is afloat, and trembles with longing.
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