Excerpt from the book Horror Vacui

ZOMBIE



In your three-piece suit and your tuxedo shoes
you’re dressed as if to go, but in your coma
you do not come or go. The wife you left
has come down from the mountain to give
you a matching ring of glass. Your doll-sized
daughter has brought you a kelp flower
that smells of salt to pin to your lapel.
Into your welmish eye, she says
the world is dreadful and you should go now.
But nothing rouses you from the deepwater sleep
in which you melt like an iceberg. On a canopied bier
fit for a sun king, you float and dream of what?
Your kaleidoscope? An octopus? The suitcase,
packed with a warm coat and dried apricots
for your soft teeth, waits at the door.
On the far shore your mother waves for you.
Her little white flag is a seagull’s wing.
There you do not go to her. The bridge stops
in midair, the perch of the swan diver.
The canoe decays into a trough of rosemary,
so I’ll bury it with roses: He loves me, he loves
me not, he loves me, he loves me not he loves
me not. Can you hear me? My ear to your ear
and my dumb voice boomerangs. Your brain
a beehive, its combs dormant from the first
snowfall are full of rings and echoes.
On the floor the cat crouches, lapping
your spilled coins: clink clink clink.
The gargoyle climbs down from his gable
to sit in your rubber plant. He sings a lullaby.
Your paper lips sip an air tube, passive
as a bored child. Your daughter has just
pulled off your caterpillar mustache.
Your wife has turned into a sunspot.
Today I have a small blue heart made of velvet.
I listen for the chanticleer to declare
all-clear for you to go. He has gone,
flown kamikaze into yesterday’s sun.
Now my kingdom of dirt will not fill
the flowered urn where I will store
and sift your ruins bitter for a golden hair.
Now my arm is growing into an orange branch
as I speak. The moon has risen full
behind my leafy eyes. I want to sleep, but
the owl who is eating my tongue says no.





EPITAPH X



My birthright I have traded for a petal dress
and a summer eulogy. I have pawned my soul
for this opal ring, the color of a pale, taxidermied eye.

If I could carry calla lilies on my shoulder once more
like an umbrella in daylight, I would lean them
on the cemetery gate and sleep until the groundskeeper found me.

For some of us, beauty is carcinoma.
The saint’s stigmata is god’s rose, bestowed
for forgoing a human lover, who will, of course, die.

I died last year. My mother made her tears into crystal
earrings and clipped them to my ears. “Son, you will
pay for your sin,” my father spoke from his throne of glass.

Stars burn a sharp, white nacre until they evaporate.
The moon’s flamingo unfolds her iodine wings over the broken city.
My necropolis. My teeth are the fruit of your olive tree.