My claim, my chime, I am a fiction, fixed
and ever mindful, a tome so restless
my rations breed a burn, my chapters best
imbibed with stout. I, however, eat heartily
from the apple in your neck and am
emasculate, immured, today the ploughman,
tomorrow the priest, prostrate
above passion’s vault of probable bones.
You’re lit by my rashness, a torch
subject to my frost, which feathers
and leaves its mark on you,
roseate and wild. Such nights
pale at my calamitous mornings,
to which our tired harp strums refute, refute.
—A. B. Epstein, “Love, Nomad”
Art Credit Arkhip Kuindzhi, Moonlit Night on the Dniepr
