Portrait D'une Femme Poem by Morgan Michaels

You sat on the sofa between plumped throws
the sofa's silken back conforming to your own-
its apple green stripes traversing your dress,
flowing down and onward, ending in a mess
around feet crossed in a golden square
cast by the sun on the tannish Turkish pile.

Behind it, the shifrellas, the Three Sisters
hung motionless above you, whisper gossiping,
glad to be dragged in from the outdoor chill
to pass the dark season snug and warm,
till Spring, with our aid, transported them again
back to the porch to hissily grow and blow.

About you the room sank gently like a ships' prow
while I in my stern rose across the rug
then sank, as you teetered (it seemed) oppositely up-
like the night before, except that that was night
while this was day. Window-lit, our smiles
flew to each other and fused, about mid-room.

Just as aboard the boat, the night before
that teetered gently through the waves, through
Light, stretched like melting candy, out from shore,
and the Statue of Liberty had loomed up to lee
suddenly, stern in her lit toga of unearthly green,
and the bridges straddled the flood at either In.

The sofa stripes repeated themselves in your dress.
The sun revealed itself at rugs' edge.
The erewhile ship repeated its pitch in the room
while in your eye I saw dancers wheel and glide
joined at the hip and cheek, to brisk samba strains
across last nights' small dance floors' parquets.

Like holograms, our loosed smiles fused in mid-air.
We knew then that, in its swing, the pendulum of life
hung poised to begin its whistling backward swing-
its ending and and beginning moment the same:
all rather mindless, surely, but wasn't it good to know
just where, at any moment, its precise degree?