Twelve Stones on a Necklace

1
Air, air. She surfaced, gasping,
her exhaustion trailing her in adularescent bubbles,
like a flaw in the sea’s blue moonstone.

2
Too soon, you vanish into the intaglio of memory.
Where your visage fades into the night’s black onyx,
the marcasite of stars.

3
The mirror tells her it's time.
She takes them off at last, the amethyst earrings,
allows herself to settle in the middle of the double bed.

4
A Saint-Saëns concerto, La Muse et le Poète.
Over the mother-of-pearl inlay on the cello,
your fingers decipher the sphinx' second riddle.

5
You unearth love with a geological intuition,
cleaving this igneous heart to reveal a hidden feldspar,
shining, a labradorite iridescence.

6
Transfigured by Magritte:
your eyes of celestine fire, your lips the blush of rose quartz,
floating in the evanescence of your face.

7
Bipolar moon, you render fire and ice, hematite and opal,
love’s breathless gasp and the wolf’s dark exhalation,
tranquility and storm.

8
A lotus flower framed in a trellis of leaves.
A crane, its beak lifted into a spray of peach.
Ribbons of jade braid into a celadon spring.

9
An Abyssynian with topaz eyes surveys its
colossal domain. Ozymandias, king of kings,
on the precipice of the bedroom dresser.

10
Shadowed in a facet of the rainforest's emerald face,
the anaconda uncoils an ancient geometry.
Finally we are, facing infinity, breathless.

11
Five miles above the Atlantic, you fall into dreaming.
Somewhere between Paris and San Francisco,
the sky turns the color of sapphire.

12
For you I wish that these poems were rubies,
borne by my own caravan from Xi'an out of Shaanxi,
through Persia, along the northern Silk Road