
Pathologist's Elegy
by Sergei Linkov
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.