Love Makes Us Strangers To Ourselves Poem by Gary Corseri

That night, you went swimming in my brain
and all your scales were glimmering;
you sang an old song, too,
about the wind in a bamboo forest.

When you shook off your pearls, you sank me.
There were strawberries, too,
in a bowl of coral porcelain.
The moon shuddered from a surfeit of silver.

Wasn't it then that the hatter appeared,
thumping his tom-tom, and the mist
arose in our blood cells,
roaring over the refined lagoon?

We were standing in the middle of Agra
in the sludge of a dull afternoon,
the horns mooing, the cows honking,
when the eclipse came and your eyes caught fire.

Or, was it fragrance from an afterlife,
caught in that dream, eddying towards
this irresolution, undermined by apparitions
in motley caparisoned?