Jackdaw

False are the ways of a woman, in words and deeds alike, and although she may seem fair to behold, it is the result of laborious use of pigments, and if she is stripped of these many devices, she is like the jackdaw that was plucked of its feathers in the fable. —Achilles Tatius Each night, she would stay in his sleep and in bed morning would break early:he locked himself in the day, no bathroom, only windows: a mirror, tubes, tweezers, bottles the finger split gape and translucent sweets rose lips of milk wash paint her a new skin (Elizabeth) filling gouges, a weeping face with sores thick-black lead whispers from lashes or a jar of pupil and shelled eye-lids for the wafer, rose lips rub away the gloss a patch of flash—between tongue and teeth: each night, she’d stay in his sleep, in his head smearing soot, stamen, cocoa on cotton cream; his fingertips on skin faint as the trace of insect legs or the first dawn-light on closed eyelids.