Trompe L'Oeil

Evening slipped like a trick

Into that accomplished courtyard

Where the statues, busy with their hands,

Each day continued their investigations:

The girl presenting her stone breast,

And the boy who laughed

Into the cobwebbed mouth of the lion.

But inside, the stars already shone

Since noon, painted on the ceiling.

And girls, gone mad in the worst period,

Stood on the walls imploring birds.

I loved most a door, half-open,

Whose incredible dishonesty showed a prince

Naked and weeping, hands outstretched,

Deep in the humors of an Indian garden.

One night, dreaming, entered his thin world

That water washed away, and fought to bring

Him out into the literal room, but had no luck:

Like cutting photographs apart

To see a body underneath the faithful clothing.

Fear when I finally touched him made me run away:

Such deadly flatness of his plaster flesh-

That in the morning, even painted silk

Meant death; the black and purple

Gauze that hung around the bed

Faintly displaced by wall, by alternate painted breeze.

That bed! whose feet, on cloudlets,

Made me dizzy just to think of them.