It didn’t hurt to hear. How can that be?
For all these years, so daggerous was it,
so ruinous for every part of me,
so opposite-of-rapturous it hit.
How is it that such blood can be so washed
from such a perfect painting as this song?
Whose figures bled onto their canvas, sloshed
in wounds their very beauty had so drawn?
But now ‘tis beautiful again—’tis dried,
the blood that stained the painting that I loved,
and now the wounds have blissfully belied
the hells to which their figures had been shoved.
The song is precious once again—I fill
my wounds with it, that sought, my love, to kill.
~~~
I told myself that it was true, the thing
I’d never let myself believe before—
what other healthy men and women bring
to everything, that my mind never bore.
It never had been given me, that heart
that knew whatever feeling that it had
was wanted, and would find an equal part
with someone who would call it good, not bad.
I only knew the opposite. I knew
the kind of sanctuary that kept out
most everything I thought, and only grew
the thoughts that stifled raw ones at their spout.
So I invented goddesses who mused
with me on all that had been thus abused.