TO THE WIFE
“Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,” Laertes to Ophelia, HAMLET
In your absence,
I built brazen altars
across other women’s thighs.
I licked your wounds
in the plush lap of other fates.
Because you named me Lazarus,
I crawled back up my winding sheet
into the womb,
to my unmaking.
I worshipped the white worms
dropped on the mirror
in your name.
I rang sonorities on the soft bell
of yelps, sang hosannas
haunted by the glad pains
we took to erase all the psalters
of cacophony, bred crows
under green light
as a sacrifice
to my one bawd of euphony.
I gave generously to each
and every succubus
that knocked at my loins.
Like a holstered sidearm
I hang my cock on the bedpost at night
and hug to my chest
the huge pink maps
of our old campaigns
and the chart of the valhalla-to-come,
the quilt you shrugged aside that morning
of the surrender
leaving me forever
this unmade bed.
A skin stretched over a simmering kettle,
a drum left out in the rain,
I sweat out the nightmare
of the veteran. Memories turn
and straddle my prone body,
making strafing runs.
Your breasts explode
in my clenched eyes
like napalm.
Sleep-snared limbs jerk and clutch
at the magnolia-dense odor
of sizzling flesh
and the armless lady rises
in the furnace, gathering to herself
the manna weeping
from the dreaming red cloud.
Oh pillar of flame, night by night
I am swallowed up
in your molten belly
and forged anew,
one of the lazari,
a walking scarecrow
made of welt and weal,
a golem on the road
to Jerusalem.
