Mimic

Mimic
by Carolynn Kingyens
You’ve been here before
but can’t place the landscape
by its rapture of paper birch trees –
frayed and fierce, ghostly white
as sleeping geisha’s.  A low-lying fog
encompasses this world, and echoes the essence of familiar fragility
because you know by now
the sequence of a smile,
how a mouth in full can hang the moon like an iridescent pearl
between its teeth; light beams reflecting off the canvas of flesh not water – the back and thighs,
in the triangular hollows that bone sometimes make,
generating a lie as real as pleasure.