Her sexual abstraction takes even the most depraved of men by surprise.

She boasts of her conquests
     in morning’s breaking light
     as she brings her legs
     back together

How often she surprises even herself.

This is not a woman really known for her purity! Still, if you know the woman just from her sexual exploits, go immediately to the back of the class.

If you are foolishly tempted to label
     her, she’ll simply switch gears

An entire life of mythic proportions;
her world feels stage managed,
yet she deserves credit
as stage manager.

She likes to demurely deny
     that she even likes sex

As props go, men simply come cheap.  She revels in their adoration, devoting herself in putting them through their paces.

She has a love-hate relationship with her own myth, but both the love and the hate feeds her savage seduction.

When an image of herself becomes
      predictable, she throws it away and
      starts over

Before long she’ll present
abstractions as true love,
far from free offerings
of softness of flesh.

Uninvited overtures will snap shut all sexual overtones, presenting the cold indifference of virginal chastity.

She boasts that “nothing like me has
     ever come into this world before”

She seductively presents as a woman shaping and reflecting the male gaze, posing nude with her hair drawn tightly back from her classic bone structure.

When she tires of their perversities,
she silently re-emerges clothed,
with her hair down
and a soft pressed smile beneath –
pale eyes downward cast.

She’ ll move slow and with purpose
from empty room to empty room –
her dress hanging loose and full,
denying her sultry curves; as chaste
as a newly ripened peach.

Abstraction as revelation,
     shifting effortlessly
     from sultry siren
     to matronly madonna.

She is a mixture of soft pastels
and vibrant splashes of watercolors, with whiplash-inducing impulsiveness.

When she loves, her colors
     have sudden explosive intensity.

    When she hates, she progressively
    tightens and redefines herself.

The lack of any real separation
between reality and abstraction
is not to be carelessly measured
between sunrises and sunsets;
It is found in labored, tortured breaths
drawn between clenched teeth.

“Anything but flatness,”  she prays
as the darkness of night envelopes her
and carries her in its downward spiral.

By that time, it has become all but empty of feeling. The show opens with a dull if surprisingly contemporary picture of clouds,

After so many years
     of living in the eternal,
     Of loving in the abyss
     she has adopted a view
     from above the clouds.

Abstractions, her long and lonely hours
down to the bones and the wilted flowers.