When a poet writes He writes his female’s throbs With fingers of wistfulness And loving curiosity He turns her, one page after another Reads her, word for word Draws her, angle for angle And tabulates her, field by field He reviews her Itemizes her Draws her into a gaunt frame Analyzes her enigmatic mystique Explains her with all subconscious interpretations And classifies her history and works Deciphering her is sheer delight Her footnotes and terminology Are the most marvelous bibliographic discovery Ever found by an archeologist In her pores he reads The history of vanished civilizations In her visage, he intuits the future of nations, peoples and wars He wears his reflective lenses To scatter the spectral hues On the apple of her cheeks On the pearls of her eyes On the tip of her nose On the fruit of her lips He reads how many smiles her newspapers scatter every day How many tears fall from her evening clouds How many bright outbursts arise from her east How many sunsets lose luster and vanish in her west How many lunar eclipses shake her planets How many quakes register on her inner being And how many weather forecasts announced by exotic beauties. He consults the dictionaries of all the languages of the world In an attempt to understand the secrets of her heart The pensive sadness in her eyes To fathom her wild steps To explain the perspiration on the palms of her hands He searches for her jungles For all her fruits, sour and sweet For the variegated mushroom growing behind her ears For the lumps hidden beneath her sandy skin For all the tropical forests, teaming with wild animals Roaming under her hair He looks for the colorful birds That build their nests in the folds of her skirt For the giraffe hidden behind her legs For the gazelle eating the grass of her bosom For the lioness trapped in the heart of her necklace For the cat hanging from her anklets, He looks for the Victoria river-sources in her eyes For the Kilimanjaro mountains in her geography For the ferocious Kenyan’s lions in her lair For the forests and dense savannas For sweet and salty corn For sugar canes and cocoa For coffee beans and cardamom seeds For rubber dripping from her lips He looks for colorful snakes in her braids For shallow swamps, teeming with fishes and ferocious crocodiles For all the challenges, all the risks and dangers He looks for all the primitive tribes that play the tango And celebrate her offering a sacrifice Unto the cursed jungle deities He tenaciously and persistently endeavors to uncover The feminine myth That never ceases to register the silent roar Of the lovers’ Niagara Such is the reading of the female of poetry, of magic and charm He understands her exuberant fits of anger Her mock tears Her comings and goings Her droughts and downpours He comprehends why she screams Knows her reckless heedlessness And why she tosses away her dreams Beneath the sharp and pointed Wheals of the field tiller He understands her mad infatuation With the illusion of poets That shatters the pride of her femininity The poet will not find his poems under a white pillow Nor beneath the covers of a bed Groaning under a sorrowful lamp He may find her with an eastern morning breakfast With a salted tomato slice With a piece of double-cream white cheese He finds her in tealeaves Swirling in bulged circles Sinking hotly and gracefully He finds her in a little sugar cube Dancing around the waist of a silver spoon Until thoroughly dissolved He finds her in a breadbasket Woven by bamboo fingers He finds her lazily yawning Beneath a red, flimsy kerchief Lying atop outer layers of hulled wheat Scattered on the face of unleavened bread He finds her in sips of orange juice Served with continental breakfast He finds her in the neck of a silver teapot Singing the dewy morning song With the throat of a migrating swallow He finds her playing with a bottle Of carnation-perfumed water :He finds her in the wakefulness of all these little things With the chirping of birds In the early dew-besprinkled dawns He tries to catch her But she slips from his fingers As a hard-boiled egg Free of its calcium coat A poet who binds his female In a Bohemian night Is an insane poet Who has delved beyond the subtle sound barrier A poet who is incapable of transforming himself into “gender” Is no poet A true poet champions both femininity and masculinity He doesn’t write (about) the female, everyday In the supply-and-demand manner Nor after the manner of beautiful women, in a list :Choose what you will Lebanese appetizers French pastries Mexican barbecues Arabic pickles Tangy salads Hot lasagnas Offered by male-enticement restaurants When a poet dies His pen is emptied of the female mercurial ink Then shrines of poetry fall Magnificent palaces collapse Tents burn down Blogs scatter Verses lose rhyme Poems lack necks Female’s radiation disappear across the ether Death of poetry and poets announced A death harder than the death of the great More grievous than the demise of leaders and politicians Of inventors and astronomers For when a poet dies Female and poetry also die And the sacred fire place of life Dies down as well