Prelude to Love
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Given an unknown face: first, hair;
                                         then what the eyes are doing; then
monkey-wise, the covert volley, eyes to mouth, mouth to eyes,
                                                                        do they match?
Let's say yes. The hoped-for, pleasurable, reassuring mouth.

But this is a photo, a portrait. Long hair, black eyes—
my gaze skips the rest.
                             Whose wouldn't? Except for a necklace, no,
not a necklace, except for her earrings, she's naked.

Bare breasts, sepia pale, pushing out from the portrait fully,
contoured against her, plum shadows curving under. How they fall
a summer's day of leisurely scoops and burdens from shoulders
     to ribs,
plum space where her arm curves in, a last light sash of sepia
     ribcage.
                                                                                 cropped.
Whose genius is she? How is she beautiful, erotic,
and yet so like a bare, unpainted table?
Her hair is straight and long, and parted in the middle.
Her face is broad, Her gaze, flat. Her mouth, unsmiling.

But how extravagant her earrings are. Finger-weaving.
Looped through large hoops at her ears,
long lattice-work strands drape like braids over her breasts,
the two ribbons held in a V by a third,
hooked, one ear to the other,
which hangs like a loose chin strap, or martingale.
The whole of it makes a breastplate.

She's posed as if she's in a mission,
standing under the arch of a mission window, looking out.
Almost courtly, the arousals, almost Spenserian, to be so
     framed,
                                                                   her neather parts
concealed in secret shadow farre from all men's sight,
space pulled up like a hight-waisted Empire gown. A Victorian
     postcard,
not the racy, raw mementos, the private snaps that came
in the 1890's with the new handhelds, with the "Facile"
     and Kodak Falcon.
The sill is a blank place to nail a plaque with a legend:
                                         Dangers of the Indian Country,
part of a series. Frontier Exposures. File it backward in time,
archival, colonial nude. Or as, perhaps, a prelude to love.