Under A Grand Influence

(The writer defines her Winter home)

I live in a house haunted
by antique doorknobs
and white radiators.

I save soft flannel
to polish brass
and keep odd keys
in a bowl to bleed
the iron vertebrae.

As water drips, tension
is also drained
from my spine. The muse
returns to a warmer place.

Nerves relent, become receptive
to the room's mystique, its objects
imported scandal. The doorknobs
were shipped upstate
from the old Waldorf
Astoria that burned
in flames whisked from Fifth
Avenue to Market Street

Dorothy Parker's petite
fingers still grasp,
linger on
from the time
she turned her life
over to that suite
scented with amaretto.

Evening pulled in
like a dark limousine
delivering its round
of bathtub steam, candles
and cabaret lover.

Afterwards, she wrote --
My love is quick to come and go-
a little here, and then a little there...

And I sense it's quite
similar to the way
heat circulates through this house,
never full or constant
but needing to breathe
void of pressure, penetrating
the fragile skin, my own
pale, more wanting
than a tango rose.
________________________________

Note -- The painting is called, "Black Purse" by artist, Fabian Perez.