Beauty (poem)

Beauty

I know more than I have learned

Others whom I fear

Are kin to me and bear

my colors we are broken one by one

from safe allées among tall trunks

Down through resined crowns the wind

raises pale hair on our bare arms

I stand again at the shore

I listen to a voice that I mistrust

A human noise

I smell nothing and hear little that

They of fur and feather know

True the water shines

A black sea at its core cold as fate

Crackling underfoot water turns to glass

We see loveliness in our shivered faces

and yours outcast adrift

dips like the setting moon

their probing fingers cannot touch the clouds at sunrise

through rippling pools turning stones

to feast on worms

We crunch eggshells pleased

to grind our back teeth

So then the riddle of the sphinx—

A spider web that floats as gossamer

A slug whose skin reflects a diamond light

A human heart that loves the thing it hates

The Comfrey Plant

(2015, Stephanie Foster)