Arcadia
	Hear the songs you crave. You shall have your songs, she another kind of reward.     -Virgil, Eclogue VI
			The city is sleeping in.  Their breaths rise and part.  Here at my desk and on a kind of wing, I slip into a dream that you seem to deliver: hips lifting and rocking, heels digging in. O, what kind of play is this? Is it what is real and what is not? What clarity it brings about the mind’s cool refusal to over-script the heart’s sense of time; about the body’s urge to live its life. Pulled from one place, how naturally it grafts itself onto another; how, even in the driest season, we look for yield: shocking pink blossoms from clay earth or lilies from the dry cross-weave in a chair of forgetfulness. Or, about love’s need to perform what it knows – as in Rodin's artful unfinishedness: a passionate kiss, a woman’s hips turning on a mass of roughhewn marble to which lovers are always attached.
		Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey.  All rights reserved. Forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Vol. 9, Spring 2008.