In a liquid mirror of smoldering cinder her reflection swiped once across the center, hastily, with a greasy palm born of toil and abandon that November’s eve, the year when time changed direction. From the suction of boundlessness it popped like a champagne cork through the event horizon of a new star’s conception, reflecting inside itself like a water-balloon-snake toy as it passes between a child’s two hands. This night was forever and gone. She,.. I…, am still, yet my body beats a cadence, a wave of chair-dance undulation. Though the music, off in the distance, chants the chorus of many monks. It moves my soul with the passion of any miracle of thunder.
…at which point the snake charmer sits slightly more erect, the hat on his head a perfect pillow of velvety ribbon and magic that stays true even still in full light of daytime’s scrutiny and arrangement. He does not speak. He neither slightly even tosses a glance during the courtship to his betrothed danger-giver, whose fangs hang and form the shape of a reverse-colored cat’s eye beneath his tangled and braided bead-mess of a beard. There is, he often reminds us, no shame in trying to get what you really want. The snake charmer has never lost a single rattle to anything or anyone. Even the trees know not to dare. They don’t want to be the last when they had been, once before, the first.
Slowly, backwards, the snail suddenly slides, singing softly the sorcerer’s song.
She shan’t speak such somberly saturnine seductiveness, still sexless she swoons.
© 2009 Pina Rosana
the space between the notes 