Burning

After “Life Drawing” by R.A. Villanueva 

I am bare and bathed in tea light. She is 

rendering my breast in charcoal, insisting 

on candles. "The sun is too filtered," she says,

the blinds pulled closed, "I need the light 

right here." When I was preparing dinner, looking 

for a sheet tray in the oven drawer I saw 

the gas flame somehow stirring the gray 

speckled enamel into a purple tone. Such charm 

is endless, how peppers turn to meat, 

how onions clear; the engoldening air. 

She is tracing and rubbing and 

tracing again the cavity beneath an arm, the 

downward slope of a shoulder. I look 

at a flame and see pattern, see feathers, see

at that red corner of air and fuel and

heat caught in form: the tired eroticisms, 

the first stanza, this sedentary behavior.

Now she is drawing my collarbones and 

the melting candles shift the angles. When 

I ask, "What remains when we burn 

through the externals?" The angles 

recline, slip into covetous posture, she says, 

"Nothing is unchanged after passing 

through fire." Then what of my presence 

in that composition which cuts off 

at my throat? Already I see imaging is a kind 

of ownership, see her carrying the paper 

rolled beneath her arm like an urn. 

She darkens a nipple and I cross out

with my pen the lines in which she speaks

and says things she has not said and then 

I write again those same lines. I etch them in

with the things I have not said: "I fear 

I don't actually want to be touched, that I want 

an object, possession, that I want to win. 

That you may not like me when I’m ash, that I 

couldn’t be a lover when annihilated, or that 

it may be that I can’t before." I reach 

to snuff out the tea lights and she says, "Wait, stay 

like that, with your arm bent." I don’t

say a thing, the small dark room dimming.