The Woman with a Mirror in Her Heart

The men always said she was Beautiful.
Gave her copper tokens of exaltation to slip into her gloves,
Accumulating them,
so possibly the horizon would burst with oranges,
exquisite as everyone thought it to be.

The men always said she was Beautiful.
A man with glasses hanging from the book of his nose said,
her waist was the sigh before the swelling of the Caspian Sea,
her hips, a candelabra held by Prince Leopold I.
And the man whose voice was the mahogany of drums,
said her legs were pedestals which only relics could sit,
her buttocks, the glorious reconciliation between Venus and Mars.
A man with a stroke of white paint held in his teeth,
Kissed her fingers which he likened to slender ivory keys,
and eyes to moorland traversed by the steps of heather lashes.
The man with the finely glossed rings,
said her hair was a sable stretching in autumn dusk,
and her lips, a pomegranate as the skin unfolded to the seeds.
And the men said she was Beautiful,
regarded her cheekbones as plateaus of fuchsia orchids,
and her neck the slope of a dune after a breath passed by.
The men always said she was,
as beautiful as the stars dared to be.

But the clouds continued to cover the horizon with their palms,
and she couldn’t tell the moon from the sun,
her gloves sagging with the weight of tarnished coins.

A little girl,
face of a newborn plum blossom,
eyes freshly brushed the morning sky,
gazed curiously at the woman.
The little told the woman she was
“so very beautiful”,
smiled with buds of lips,
then proceeded to keep pace with the hand she was grasping.

Slowly,
amber glows of beams warmed the woman’s hands,
she cast her gloves into a puddle,
the tokens melding into a brackish gleam.
And she looked towards the horizon,
holding oranges in her eyes.