Kaprova Street. Prague. 2011. 11 am.

I think I made you up inside my head.
-Sylvia Plath


Like the cold air and the rain, waiting round a corner.
I had witnessed seven wonders, converted to stone, waiting for me
and offering me the beauty of a city, entranced, a heart-thief,
the silent pulse under a grey and single artery. The waltz nothing,
just the whisper of a wind and the shadows of buildings
shedding no light on the secrets, on its half-drunken core.
The churches with blonde religious symbols.
The Charles University and your secret language
and the bridge with beautiful and disciplined guardians
led me to those strange mysterious chances. Apparition,
faint as shaking leaves, a spirit of the city at the corner.
A faerie electric, otherworldly, looking at a place other than my life,
a piece from a dream made flesh and water, for there was no other
sign of atoms that could have made eyes as deep as yours.
That could have made lightning a mortal scar,
that could have traced thoughts and consciousness
into thirty seconds of pure bliss. Mind-dazed, awkward
in a silence sounds like INXS, the outpour of a heart
that had created you, and that was then mute, a dummy,
fading inside a smile, that was made a bridge of further traveling
than the one I had known. A Romantic tale imprinted on skin.
Your hair as those starless nights on peripheral roads
that had made me brand your hometown as a woman,
coy in her sublimity, her European mystique of an old alchemist
floating in the ocean of your eyes, the mad connecting oceans
that led your continent to fruitless searches and winding legends
that I hoped you could see back in me, wingless madwoman.
Darkened afternoons in awe of your lips, that bore
the mark of a flag you belonged to, the color of a rival and a demon.
(They used to teach so in schools before, even to us).
Your skin—the ultimate howling of a lone wolf,
looking all around for signs of life—the lost, the drowned in a pale
avalanche. The spirits that advanced towards a your homeland
unaware of its crystalline peril. Their corpses are the bones of your back.
You, a poetry-whore, daemon, cornerstone of verses in a corner.
Vivid emotion made unintelligible, and primal.
Memory made desire, made hope, made perfect future.