Pathologist's Elegy

I remember how your blood sang 

and the millefleur vital reactions

strewn across your skin; I, kneeling like a unicorn,

and the eyes that peered through your Saint-Justine hair

while I prodded with my puppy-nosed instrument

sniffing out your delicate machinery

in which my seeds would never quicken. 

 

Ah! little stoat,

dandled on the knees of cypresses

you sleep so soundly, my telluride pet.

 

And so I dredged you, bloodless Lorelei,

from my mephitic river, full of chicken bones

or the femurs of miscarried infants;

from my morass of shattered spleens and hyoids

I mapped the territories of your slings and arrows

like a smarmy corpse-dog glutted on its master

whose coronaries twisted on the kitchen floor;

de Rais, or de Sade,

seeking ecstasies in the greenstick limbs of car crash victims. 

 

Buried moon! Your photons scattered with the bullets

in the dappled lungs of dumpster martyrs

while I, flaccid and hysterical 

tried to shield your terrible chastity 

from the earth, who was your lover more than I.