All your rococo finery unhooked,
unlaced, on your scrubbed slab you lie
cold and blue and soft as a halibut.
Your porphiry hands—clutching now

with exemplary pudicity your punctured
breast and shaven sex—were always
cold. Old girl. I was fifteen, you,

twenty, when first—under that grossly-
cherubed canopy—your eyelids clenched
like cockles. The celestial trombones
spluttered, the wooden thunderclouds

whirled, and I lay by your side for decades,
watching the tallow tapers wilt, holding
my breath, waiting for you to thaw.

More easily satisfied with their little man,
my ministers awarded me a pretty sword
and a gold-rimmed hat. I grew adept
at suggesting grottos, cascades,

fireworks; at demanding there be
dictionaries, funerary effigies. I won
their hearts and won their funny wars.

I asked for bombs, and bombs there were.
Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay and flak and gas
and artificial limbs for grateful men
sucking on cigarettes in pale green wards.

So. There's room for two there on that slab.
The courtiers are clamoring for elegies,
and I can't disappoint them now, dear heart.

River Styx, Vol 49, 1997