Triptych, by W.F. Lantry

Fairy and Griffons, by Gustave Moreau (France). 1876.

Triptych

Drawn lights. The blinds descending. No disguise
hides anything. Soundscapes engage the room
whose alternating patterns craft our frame:
my supplications answered, in her name.
Now, as laced shades are covered, light perfume
eclipses what the daylight blossomed, ground

and air, combined with water, to surround
our limbs: fresh vines, new woven, an array
of tips and trellises. We fabricate
with each renewal, figures, recreate
her breath under whose ministrations sway
both reed and branch. All shadows disappear.

Shift focus. Change the camera angle. Sheer
textures grow insubstantial. What we hold
is shared with yet another. Through the air
descending now between us, as in prayer,
the space around us fills, her hands enfold
our motions. Now, as we become, so she

renews herself. Our patterned ecstasy,
unseen by any mirror, builds, cascades
as if the wind, through sudden waterfalls
dancing between the stream and rock, recalls
our earliest constructions. Now what fades
remains as afterimage in our eyes.​

W.F. Lantry

W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds (2011). He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), the Paris Lake Poetry Prize and Potomac Review Prize. His work appears widely online and in print. He currently works in Washington, DC. and is editor of Peacock Journal.