Studying Savonarola, he considers his lover as kindling With your amber eyes, yellow and red of you, sun-sign heart like a blood orange suspended in a porcelain cage, say you burn in a courtyard and your ichor drips like honey on the firewood, on the branches bound in fasces, flesh fumed in the air, dark as molasses, but what you are hovers as mist, as the spirit of water is invisible until steam makes the sky waver. Say you die, scorched into ashes, say you pass from here to there, with your marigold eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower, would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long blue chords on their thighs like cellists? Say you disperse like petals on the wind, the bright stem of you still a living stroke in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.

Margaret A. Griffiths (1947-2009) Tribute by Alan Wickes Obituary in the Bourne Mouth Daily Echo Eratosphereans say goodbye