The Houri and the Hoplites

As curvy as the space
around collapsars, a starlord
of a high albedo strain,
she is lounging with the languor
of iguanas, she is squamous
in her crystalline domain.

For long and long
she’s drifted here in darkness,
pariah for the violence of her will,
conjecturing stochastic, strange
encounters, and dreaming
of another chance to kill.

Blue scales have broken loose
and float around her, a torus
of detritus — a tiara
bejewelled like the diadems
of yore. In time invaders come

to mine her surface, to pry
encrusted prisms from within —
a race of armored hoplites,
avaricious, enamored
of her lapidary skin.

By slow degrees she sheds
her wonted torpor, the interlopers
wither in her gaze — a gaze
like that of some affronted Gorgon,
a relict of the vaunted glory days.

The hoplites cease their hopping,
stand there frozen
in postures nearly comic or obscene,
like pieces in a pixilated
chess game, a game whose only
winner is the Queen.