Holy Wine
by Chris Blanco
Love without touch extends instead a stare,
Laps her quaint features with its thirsty eye,
And conjugates thereby
Starveling desire with the goddess, Her.
Taste never was engaged, and seldom scent—
Absent at last; but their tongued colloquy
Makes pious litany:
Remove it and remove love’s element.
Subtract now sight and so the lover, blind,
Archives her lineaments, assiduously
Coded in memory:
The projected hologram hung in his mind.
Time recomposes memory: what then?
Her ghostly icon soon begins to waver,
Its transubstantiate wafer
Whispering over his lips, electrons of thin
Air; a drifting, evanescent vapour:
The æther lifted from her holy wine.
