Ekphrasis

When flesh does embrace
in portmanteau commingling,
all colors come skinward
in panspectral pigments...

(They defy all mean sorting
into paradigm placement,
for ardor will tolerate
no finer tinting;
love’s grandest ecstasy
shall saturate feeling.)

Come now, will you press
your cruelly fated impermanence
into mine, yes, please mine?

And let’s just pretend
that time’s quickening clockwork
—its logarithmic progression—
is photonically outlawed,
so our hues and values
may forever combine?

And likewise, when our
pixelated emotions
flow waxlike down bottles
of half-finished wine,
(corked with a succession
of candles chromatic,
whose drippings commingle
in hardening pools
at the base of our spine),

Let that be our imprint
—a chroma of Eros—
and raise its exponent
to powers of photons,
coefficients of colors
that banish all darkness,
and with it, together,forever we’ll shine.

—Thomas Brodhead, 1 December 2015