Invention was your solitude, your twin,

wasn’t it, Miss Nin?

The way you spread secret pages

like silk violet capes,

like fringed shawls,

over an air of mystery, and err

of desire.

You enabled symmetry, to confess.

Why couldn’t a woman be a fabulous opera fulfilled

nightly through shadowcall and tenor?

Why couldn’t many hands

attend fruitfully to matters of flight

and garden envy?

Paradise, for you, was always one well-flung

entry away, wasn’t it?

A diarist’s mad dash

and hush to engorge, inflame,

and export the wilds of a soul

which outgrew borders

and margins, the fluid spill of ink

a blue bloodlet to let the air in,

to carry visions to siege and form.

You warmed yourself in reveries,

Miss Nin, while attempting to detonate

and explode your neuroses, going so far

as to leave us detailed maps of your psyche’s labyrinths

and grottoes.

Yet, like a cartographer with an interiority complex,

your maps led seekers to regions well beyond you,

territories, unmarked, leading us back to ourselves,

and I, like a spelunker with a hard-on for Sphinxes,

used your maps

to my own advantage,

to reveal and baffle,

to record and dwell,

because, you see, Miss Nin,

your bones carried over

to mine,

as mine will to another,

and so on and so forth,

an underground network

of interconnected bridges and tunnels,

where the tenderest of ravels

come to know the secret bask of pink

on light.