when she's eating Caesar Salad

Is it me, a smirk on the sidewalk,
a pair of hands glancing at an eyepatch'd face?
Is it the white lights of a small wagon, reversing,
or the windows in a restaurant
that always disappear... Stars are peeled
like radishes, like little brooms in a Grand Hall
before a wedding reception. Is it her, hers?
A hint of maternal grace wiping honey from a fingernail,
an axe, a slice, an open wound? What is it
that hinges our devotion? I'm betting
on something that could lean beneath a womb,
a promise that doesn't protest...
a dream upheld by the nipples and hearts
of triple-washed vegetables. Where is a world
that doesn't hedge its own motion? A conqueror
who prays (not preys) and passes the living into death.
Where do her eyes shift? Her lashes blink... Inside,
in the moment when motion is decided she always faces
into the room, she traps grapes and napkins like a princess
usurping a raised sword from a knight...
She measures the soul of a knife-edge, the fat of romance,
she dresses a sandal with toes that abolish a stained spot
on an old carpet, a Naricissistic memory?
She asks, "what would you be doing if I wasn't here?"
The clothes she once disowned disintegrate
from her shoulders, her skin is a garden, an oasis,
a zoo... perhaps an emu or a polished flower for the expression
of bees and spiders: thoughts carving
the beauty of this view... Where else can I stare?
What petals will adapt like the supple scrubbing of her tongue?
What Flora doesn't cut our taste buds?
On that white tablecloth her bones are groping
a dead meal, cutlery, saliva smelling the vines,
olives, unpeeled onions, and milk chosen
from the right teat. She doesn't shriek
when angels pile rodents in the laneway: "oh,"
she says, "those are not for us to dispose of...",
to remember. She loosens her belt with the painting
of dour pink fingernails, she snuggles into her chair,
as though the promise of being
has yet to render this moment with more meaning.
She chews loudly. A moth flickers like darkness
at the ending of the life of an unwilling martyr...
a child on the sidewalk acting like there is no bedtime,
another glass of exhausted wine,
a third course, and in my throat the humming
of a fugitive vanishes in a paradisiacal flood.