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November 18, 2024
"Mes de los Muertos"

Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter

By Eric Robert Nolan

Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter

It was a mad and spinning world in which you met her, but she was a mad and spinning girl — so brightly and resolutely burning that she herself was celestial. There was starshine bottled up in her heart, solar winds charged the particles of her thoughts, ions in the atmosphere ignited her impulses. Her willful joy was her own burning sun.

When she was sly, her eyes were hasty comets. Her passion amassed from Saturnal storms. Her smile was silver Jupiter – you wanted to repose over its white sands, beside the stained and rose-metal lakes of smoldering, darkening copper.

Between the spaces of her words, chasms of cosmos would occasionally open. You could stare into those depths for indifferent and measureless distances of light years — the sublime nightmare-nothingness that Providence had made, the Forever-of-Empty-Dark. But before you could be afraid, her own gravity drew you in.

And you were glad. That such loveliness could exist in a single soul was reassurance. (The Forever-of-Empty-Dark wasn’t entirely empty, after all.) And you were grateful — grateful for her rejoinders, for the taste of her mouth on your own, for her girlish laugh, for the way that she regularly lighted a murky Earth with the moonbeams of her quiet kindnesses.

She was unstoppable. Ultraviolet rode the coronal shades of her irises, and flared in her contemplation. She blazed. Magnetic radiation murmured in her poetry. You loved her for her uniqueness in a universe of cold space, for the way that she burned and turned and burned and turned without ever slowing or expiring. When her light fell across you, you could almost believe that you, too, were spinning and illuminated. You loved her enough for the illusion alone.

You loved her more for her gravity that drew you in and held you, and for her arms that did the same.







First appeared in Impspired.

Article © Eric Robert Nolan. All rights reserved.
Published on 2022-11-28
Image(s) are public domain.
2 Reader Comments
Harris
11/30/2022
10:18:28 AM
As one who has experienced such celestial delights, I can relate to this poem. The last line is very cool because likely in all reality these are projected feelings from inside the self, onto the other, which is that gravity that draws one towards another.
Eric Robert Nolan
12/01/2022
10:24:18 AM
Thanks for reading, Harris! I am glad that enjoyed the poem. :-)

Your response here actually reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

“The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

James Baldwin, “Another Country,” 1962
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