Classic Poem

It is almost impersonal, when
the fair hair shawls
her shoulders in light,
the round high-Italian face
laughing out of that aureole —
like an ideogram of the sun —
or a Della Robbia tile; it is al-
most abstract, the white
wild crescent of her demon smile.
Something archetypical. I'm
always meeting her the way one
meets recurrent emblems in dreams —
helplessly, and for the first time.











By permission of the author.