The Wizard’s Sister*

Her happiness is fragile, illusory. Made up.
Like frost or thin ice.

(I respond, of course,
to the evolutionary imperative
of a bone held eight feet high.)

Her attitude ironic, salutary.
Like a prize at Smithfield.

(Specialist in alienation,
she throws the bone down by me in the mud.)

Or perhaps romantic: not cruel but unremitting,
relentless. Like life by moonlight.

* Circe (Kirke) is the sister of the wizard Aëtes