PYGMALION & GALATEA
for Joanna P.

His beard brushes below & right
her belly’s tease of pubic shadowing
protrusion, magnetically; stone 
 
lips tickle at height of thigh, near
by the soft slip inside (had his 
 
own fingers formed this soon to be lubricious 
cavity, or was that the work of some God
 
-ess, or…?) her head turned away, indicates a 
tender distance.  She, of course, has yet to come:
 
close. His huge hands & heavy brow mount
-ain stiff w/ love of cold marble. His
 
back muscles, tension of rock knots in a 
taut bulge, each trained on, straining for,
 
that bare brush of suggested breath against 
her hard-soft, cold-hot stone, hurtfully close.
 
Glisten of high gallery light on the long
luxuriant plane of her shoulder sweeps 
 
to neck & careful features, coy gaze
cast away from her creator, the unseen 
 
Venus or dead Rodin’s fascinated hands 
 & passing eyes wince at the feel 
 
of her need to breathe & his to kiss her
finally; her miracle birth abortive, her body
 
ever on  the verge of yes, tender flesh… and yet
 as his left hand endlessly lifts to clutch her 
 
buttock, thick hawk a-wing by fingers five,
frozen in mid-flight seizure, look: 
 
marble, unmoving, is somehow made to tremble
& ache. A still surface is somehow made to 
 
flow in need. Cool is somehow
made to burn. I turn away, aware of inter-
 
rupting something. I think I should leave.
She looks about to blush & breathe
& they may need some privacy.

© Sean Moreland