Jade Soleil

Half-turned from the light, she holds a stillness

that photographs cannot quite explain-

dark hair falling like ink loosed from a well,

wet-black, unhurried, tracing the line of a shoulder that knows it's own quiet power.

Even the shadows seem to know her name.

​

Her nose is drawn with a sculptor's restraint,

a clean, sure line that speaks of old blood and older wisdom-the kind that doesn't ask to be believed, only trusted.

Her chin lifts just enough to show she has never needed permission to take up this much beauty, this much room.

Eyes closed, or nearly so, lashes lowered like a curtain drawn on some private theater

wher she is both the play and the audience

--

lids heavy with thought, with warmth, with a sultriness that isn't performance but simply the weather of her.

Everything about her is lithe geometry: the long throat, the collarbone's quiet architecture,

the shoulder blade surfacing like a question beneath skin lit soft as photograph paper.

Nothing about this body is idle.

It moves even at rest, the way water moves even when the surface looks like glass.

She is exotic the way a language is exotic before you learn to love it's grammar-

strange only until you understand that this is simply another, richer way of being fluent in living.

Welcoming without trying,

intelligent in the set of her jaw, 

in the unspoken calculus behind closed eyes.

I have watched her cross a room the way certain sentences cross a page-

economical, inevitable, exact.

And I have learned that sophistication is not a costume she puts on but a climate she carries,

the way desserts carry heat

long after the sun has gone.

Half in shadow, half in light,

dark-haired and dark-eyed and entirely alive

--

sultry as dusk, warm as noon,

sharp as the chin she lifts toward tomorrow,

sensual in the plain fact of breathing,

wise in ways I am still learning to read.

Turn the page, and she is still turning too,

this woman who taught me that beauty is not a still photograph

but a woman caught, always,

mid-motion toward more life.

​

-Anonymous