Studying Savonarola (by Margaret Griffiths)

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Studying Savonarola, he considers his lover as kindling

With your amber eyes, yellow and red

of you, sun-sign heart like a blood orange

suspended in a porcelain cage, say you burn

in a courtyard and your ichor drips like honey

on the firewood, on the branches bound in fasces,

flesh fumed in the air, dark as molasses,

but what you are hovers as mist, as the spirit

of water is invisible until steam makes the sky

waver. Say you die, scorched into ashes, say

you pass from here to there, with your marigold

eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower,

would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long

blue chords on their thighs like cellists?

Say you disperse like petals on the wind,

the bright stem of you still a living stroke

in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint

and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.