MATRYOSHKI

HOW MANY WOMEN WILL IT TAKE?



Naked you are still disguised.
Asleep, or silent, you still deceive.
Even when rapture rattles your will
like dice in a crapshooter's fist,
I wonder who is acting you,
wearing you like an uncomfortable costume.


What is there in the core of you that I should hunger for,
Tearing away in my need all those layers of you
that have become, like rotting bandages on old wounds,
(the maypoled cerements of all your wombward dyings)
as much your flesh as any other part of you I touch?


The gray folds of a shroud negligee the fevered waste
that lays me low in the grave dimensions of your beds.


Irony has named you "dolls."
The full opening of one of you
proffers the fullness of nother.
What will the last of you define?
Myself? Or woman? Or nothing?