Blood Orange

Last night I dreamed
of being raped,
and retaliating:
of screaming and gnashing my teeth,
of clawing and biting and yelling
violently public obscenities,
of throwing broken shoes
and champagne glasses and scrambling
out the window of my childhood home
(a wild-eyed and frantic bacchant)
to streak stark naked
and wailing across the silvery tar-
papered roofs of a dormant Manhattan.

Fleet-foot and furious,
I ran long and hard,
only to pause,
trembling and shocked
like a trapped animal,
once I hit the last stretch
of that final roof on the corner of Greenwhich,
that place where the tarmac
became my ritual ground
and I became electrified,
rooted,
compelled to cringe
and stomp and arch my back
and leap in terrified frustration,
to tear my hair in a freakish pantomime of grief,
and to howl,
from the deepest place in my heart,
all the songs of destruction,
backlit in my archaic mania
by the obsequious figure of the rising sun:

A broken blood orange (with tattered
and dripping hemispheres revealed)
that, reddened and oozing
with the previous night's violence and surrendering,
slowly spread its indelible stain
across
the great,
white-tablecloth mesa of the morning sky,
the ghostly filaments of its hollowing skin
trailing in the breeze as translucent
crepuscular
clouds,
and its small seeds disseminating
like missives
to the lonely, hanging stars
of Callisto's great Bear.