Love Song in the Style of Ramona
You render the landscapes of the dead long enough, and eventually,
the guys come crawling. I used to love the way you would stack your victims
in photo albums. I used to love the simpering masses who loved you.
You squeezed my skeletal thigh. They have no decency, you said.
I want black cats to blanket us, I said. Even a breeze could have evicted us
from our bodies back then. Flashbacks to the blur of purple sand
at Big Sur clotted my dreams. I wanted to call you from the beach.
Then I did, a raisin speck against an eternity of sea cliffs.
Imagine flying a holding pattern over your own body
as you do in dreams of death. You looked so silly with that black-blue hair dye
spotting your pillow with violets. I used to dream of translating these flowers
into a language at some later juncture. Then your art electrified the undead
community with its sexual intensity—Abraham Lincoln begging to rip off your blouse
with its gold buttons, and with your feathers for eyes, you appeared
the clear goddess of timeless erotica. Of course you were Russian. Of course
the dead don’t discuss such things, you said. No, I admitted,
the dead have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.
