Found Out
 
                                  I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
                                  But I am completely nourished.
                                                                    —Amy Lowell
 
It was mostly innocent by then,
our excursion to the city
to see the many galleries,
the great library
sentinelled by lions,
 
the stained glass panes
of crumbling old churches.
We walked arm in arm
lost in art and talk of art,
with no thought to who
 
might see us and report.
We were a pair as excited
by ideas as we had been
by the sin the our flesh
previous afternoons.
 
And we knew—
or at least I did—
that the flesh inferno
had given way to
a more steady flame,
 
the sane spark mentoring is.
Already, I could feel
the bliss of something inside
long meant for kindling
finally kissed by fire's tongue.
 
I crackled with the prospect of
becoming known as someone
more than the woman
who wore a red cape.
 
Would I paint abstracts like Wolf
or compose personal tracts
like Thoreau?
I didn't know, but understood
my former chaste self-restraint,
 
my polite apology to society
for being female was over.
I'd become author of some new
inscrutable ever after.
Hellfire was to come our way
 
because someone
mother knew had seen
the Wolf and I that day.
My husband Hunter would be
hurt, shamed.
 
My mother, would be outraged,
casting blame.
My Grandma, very ill by then,
could only speak my name,
smile and squeeze my hand.