Keith S. Wilson

“Café-Concert at Les Ambassadeurs,” 1876–77 by Edgar Degas i have a red dress and no eyes. i have a dress that is blood red and i have eyes that don’t blink when the balcony sucks in. my dress is a beet swollen with thought, and hangs like a body on my body. i have eyes that don’t blink at being seen. i was halfway finished before i saw i’d begun. my dress drips down the center. my eyes are needle holes and my dress is an over-red thread. i hang my words in the air by their feet, limp and damp, and my dress is my only laugh that is actually red. my eyes are the backs of moons and afterwards men jest us like children, and smoke, and women who have been my dress circle their stomachs with their hands. i’m an actress. this is not my mother tongue. i have a dress that is yellow. my lines are written by a parisian man. we met in london. i came dancing out like god upon a crimson wave. my dress hung like a question or a suddenness. he wrote me coming out this way, he says, to make me like a lioness. the constellations are full of dead women, he says. he says my dress is the coat of a great lion. i turn like the blood inside a rose. the crowd is a great gasp. i can feel myself become a pear. it’s as if you haven’t taken pills, he says. i still have that dress. it’s not too blonde or red. you can grasp it with your eyes, he said, the way you wear it.

If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still. — Homer I’m striving to be a better astronaut, but consider where I’m coming from, the exosphere, a desk where the bluest air thins to a lip. Impossible to know the difference from where I sit and space. I promise I still dream of coming back to you, settling on your yellow for the kitchen. We won’t fight. Let it not manifest. Not over the crumpled bodies of laundry. Let us not row over the nail polish, its color, the spilled sun. Inspiration is the deadliest radiation. It never completely leaves the bones. You know. From here, there are no obstructions but the radiant nothingness. An aurora borealis opens like a fish. This. To the pyramids, yes, to a great wall. And there you are, moving from curtain to curtain. O, to fantasize of having chosen some design with you. But the moons over Jupiter. But asteroids like gods deadened by the weight of waiting. I remember you said pastel for the cabinet where the spice rack lives. That I ought’ve picked you up flowers when I had a chance. Daisy, iris, sun. Red roses. Ultraviolet, the color of love (what else but this startles the air open like an egg?). I’m really trying to be better, to commit to memory the old songs about the ground, to better sense your latitudes, see the corona of your face. Take your light as it arrives. Earth is heavenly too. But know that time is precious here. How wine waits years and years to peak. What is there to do: I’ve made love to satellites in your name. I’m saying I can’t say when I’ll return. Remember me, for here are dragons and the noble songs of sirens. Stars that sway elysian. Ships that will not moor, lovers who are filled with blood and nothing more. Who could love you like this? Who else will sew you in the stars? Who better knows your gravity and goes otherwise, to catastrophe? I’ve schemed and promised to bring you back a ring from Saturn. But a week passes, or doesn’t manage. Everything steers impossible against the boundless curb of light. Believe I tried for you. Against space. Time takes almost everything away. To you. For you. A toast to the incredible. I almost wish I’d never seen the sky when always there was you. Sincerely,