Sublunary Curse

You do not exist.

Sweet ashen maquillage.
Do you remember the day
I brought you home in that

silly

pewter

ossuary?

Burying fingers deep, coating cheekbones
in precious powdered
Beloved
bone, flesh and soul.

The day before we let you set sail
to dance forever with Zephyros’ wildness
to dwell as you willed with Nethun’s children.
Phantasm of Nepenthe.

Where are you now, my Symmetrical Companion?
My purples gone, bereft of opalescent nights.

You are no longer you.

When you had a face
and a death date
and I scratched my face
in blood streaks to embed the saline rawness
and hurled whatever touched my belly into any
willing receptacle
and I traced your picture so ritually, in imprint
ravaged glass…

Then you existed.
Then you were dead.

All those votive offerings
of celebate convulsion.
Evidencing to all
that my essence
the spearhead of my womanhood
was defined by your absence.

Such secure agony.
Oh, the ever fixed mark.
As stiff twin compasses
were two.

My ebon broaches. pomanders, ropes of pearls,
my night silk farthingales
The glorious regalia of my widowhood
does not become me now…

Oh yes,
I had it all figured out
Breath by breath till surcease
of breath.

Yes, the primal sympathy
which having been … must ever be … me.
Yes, the soothing thoughts
that spring out of unending human suffering…

But now grief abates and “you” assume new form
and I know no matter how hard I press the accelerator
I shall
never reach anything that connects you to me
and ...

... Goddamn it

I will swerve
before the consummational merging
of steel and concrete wall.

Gone …
… are the ‘lamb white days’
of ‘green and golden’ existence
past tense.

I could live with a memory.
I could live as a widow.

I have no referent for need.
I have no referent for wanting to be
free of delectably suffocating solitude.

Now,
I want “you.”
And I don’t know who you are.
Oh, I am assaulted by litanies of images
gyrating, taunting, devouring remnants
of the surety of self.
Because I have again ‘eyes, lips, hands to miss’
and I yearn again for dull sublunary lovers love.

I want to live with phantoms.
I know where and how they dwell.
I want my widow’s weeds back.
I want to be that imaginary axis of two twined compasses
forever spinning en pointe
spiraled memory eternal
Nibbana’s tintinnabulations.

I do not want to know I have lips
and loins.
I want to weep over what I have lost
not what I cannot NOT imagine
not what I cannot bear.


You are no longer “you”.
I am no longer “me”.