"I named your lips Fate"

I named your lips Fate
to give myself no choice.
I wouldn't have had the courage,
I would have burned my eyes.

I brushed Fate thrice with my tears
and the preacher mouthed foreign words
that bounced from rooftop to rooftop
like grains of sand in a storm.

The blister squirted me in the eye
and I wept rose liqueur,
mixing salt-sand grit and fig juice
on my cheek and lips.

Bitterly, I bathed in them
with no power to turn them to gold.
I am no alchemist, no tyrant,
and the buskers kept playing to the beggars.

But they call to me, I said, the waves.
If I were captain of a grand ship,
they would all be mine,
this temptuous tempest.
Yet I have neither the courage
nor the roses to woe what I would.