Segments Of A Circle Poem by Norman F. Santos

The stained-glass sky flounces and shatters
As the wonder of the night scintillates
Upon the sleeping skin of a promenade
In the circlet roads of a silent ballet

Light perched foots steps trample upon
The maladroit blotches of the porch lights
And beneath the maw of the waxing moon
Was the silhouette of a gaudy woman

She would always be the same woman
In her sapid vagueness, no peculiarities
No sobriquets, no facades, no niceties;
A plummeting ballet herself

She is always in the equipoise of my eyelids
At the beginning and end of rainy days
Quaffing the gray sketches of the atmosphere
Riding the blue winds of tranquilized euphoria

She is always out there like the chirps of a sparrow
Whenever the moon laze in her eiderdown couch
She would be leaning effulgently to kiss the stars
That incinerates with her enigma

Sometimes she would be tender like a conch’s whisper
A surging lullaby standing by the bedpost
Crooning in the veranda and the breaking tides
In harmony with the sirens’ song

Sometimes she would be a nightmare
A phantom crumpling every reverie
A pristine picture clawed by dementia
Pinned into the frangible ceiling

The nostalgia slumbering in her brittle bones,
The wonder combing her coal tresses,
And the buoyant nights in her screaming palms
Sometimes, I think I know this woman

Before the sun rise and set in the roof beams
I do try to cipher her riddling phantasm
A void silhouette with a potent effect
A salient ballet injured in a pirouette
.
Time after time, a voice behind the blear
Would wake me from this saccharine dream
Before the steely teeth of veracity would notch
And spray the poison in a treacle cup

And how many times have I denied?
Seeing you beneath the eaves of daylight
Without the mystery but still in anonymity
With the same nostalgia inside the nattering bones

How many times have I seen you?
Your face elucidated by the hands of dawn
Your name flowing out of my derided lips
And sometimes, in my nacreous eyes

I think I know this woman of sometimes
The flakes of her grandiosity and her horrors
Perched upon the equipoise of a cycle
In undisruptive segments of a circle

Sometimes, I think I know this circle
Thousand falcate roads for a ceaseless rat race
That never ends owed to the unstable segments
Alluring for ecstasy, calling for quietus.