The Love Letters of Helen Pitts Douglass

When I stood behind his desk chair and when he sat, on rare occasions, on the porch, “sage of Anacostia,” they called him, I smelled his mane glorious, and as a hand saddle the aroma of hair took me to neckline and below. In Egypt, long after Napoleon had shot off the face of the Sphinx, I thought of this man, and the cusp of his palms on my shoulder blades; as always he was carrying the mail of gender, his touch immaculate in the true blend of the cortex, and of the complex, risen on a pulpit, and after the hot air, wintry parlance, the syllables of my name in his ear, when he touched me, as he had touched me then. I had my suspicions of English ladies, actresses, ghosts of the Thames, concubines, as we had been into this next century. And they had their wiles with him. I do not feel forbidden; the cameo ring he gave me, recession of his maleness all I need, and highlights of my dark profile, any children we might have had buried in architecture, and the hate of his daughter Rosetta, who I have spoken to over the grate. The sun rises and sets in our neighborhood: I WILL BURN THESE. But when I place my fingers in that mane it is to the saddle he will come.