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Women Who Love Too Much
Marie Mulvey-Roberts

I have written our story
On the inside of my skin
           Like a hair shirt,
Where no one can read it.

Now I walk in words,
      With your image tattooed
On the inside of my eyelid.
I cannot see if you are outside or in,
Or even really there.

Everything you touch is born.
      Touch me please,
Not with needles or knives,
But with eyes and lips.

We create our own Gothic pharmacy
Of delicate and aromatic poisons,
     Raiding it every night.

As we lie within thickets of thorns
Around our bed growing higher and
      higher,
I put my tongue inside your mouth,
Wondering if I will ever get it back.

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The Scholar and the Countess
Marie Mulvey-Roberts

         Theirs was a grammar
         Of vellum and skin,
         His black ink on white paper,
         Hers red blood on pale flesh,
         He, cartographer of Shambhala,  
Travelled to the East,
While she, most iron of maidens,
Married cold looking-glass.

Both were magicians of sorts,
She commanded girls to be statues
And drift off into winter.
Walking to heaven, he rounded up words
Of lamas and light.

Cosily, the ice countess
           Slipped into fairy tale,
           Poisoning apple and comb,
           Gleeful as Christmas,
           Pitiless as snow.

Notes

Alexander Csoma de Koras was a linguist who mastered seventeen languages. He walked almost to Tibet in search of the ethnic origins of the Hungarian people. He compiled a dictionary of the Tibetan language and was reputed to have attained mystic Enlightenment. See Edward Fox, The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven: Alexander Csoma de Koros, 1784-1842 (2001).

Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) a widowed Hungarian ruler, was walled up alive in her castle for murdering girls and allegedly bathing in their blood to perpetuate her youth and beauty. She was also reputed to torture her victims by forcing them to stand naked in the snow like human statues where they would freeze to death. The wicked step-mother in the Snow White fairytale is said to have been based on her. See Raymond T. McNally, Dracula was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania (1983).