Sacrifice

(From the Philadelphia Art Museum)

He watched her in conversations and candlelight.

Wine blended the colors. The quiet laughter and velvet room. His mind's fingertips painted glorious portraits of her skin, and he shivered with the scent of pigments.


The long line of her legs cut though the dress, and dark waves of hair fell on her white-petaled neck. She moved when he moved. Eyes ignited. A dance of glances and fluidity.

When they wrapped the cool shawl of night around them, new conversations of starlight and breeze tasted them. He drew to the moonlight in her throat, and her arms crushed him breathlessness. He drank her heat and yearned for the sculpture of her waist. The sighing trail of her thigh. They carried the shadows to their room and let fall the pretexts that clothed them.

He fed on her, open and animal. She encircled him, arched and gasping.

They pulsed the nectar of their religion and cried incantations to gods and each other's name.

They sacrificed every preciousness.

And drowsed to their confessions of need.