Lilith

Perhaps you were determined to beat
every man who haunted you, clear the night

of looming ghosts. Perhaps you desired

only to know what it was to party,

to enjoy the power of your young body,

feel the light of worship on your face.

So at a house in the suburbs you faced

thirty men in button-up shirts, heart beating

as you threw off your dress for the first time, body

frail and wan in the harsh light. That night

ended in no disaster, and you left the party

with a need for a nom de guerre. You desired

something classy. You should call yourself Desire,

I said, which you rejected with a face.

You said you liked Lilith, though at the next party

we found men’s drunken tongues were beaten

by its lisping sounds. They were Teamsters that night,

great hulks, and in play they lifted up your body

as you protested unheard. But your body

was your tool and you learned to use it, the desires

of men slowly acceding to its will. Each night

you learned a little more, how to face

down a troublemaker with a joke, to playfully beat

an unruly father with a riding crop, keep the party

under control with a gesture. Even when the party

turned mean, and a frat boy pressed upon your body

with brute insistence, or a coke dealer beat

upon your fears with an unspoken threat, your desire

for mastery was pure as alabaster, your face

locked in a diamond smile framed by night-

black hair. Still there’s no expressing the nights

we spent that way, the endless parties,

the river of nameless men’s faces,

your bared flesh, the naked voluptuous bodies

swaying and shimmering in a heat wave of desire,

and through it all the city’s electric beat.

And yours was the ivory face of the goddess of night

glimpsed through a party of tortured supplicants beating

themselves from the desire to touch your shining body.