Of every death
Preceding this moment in time
As I stand before a painting
Of a young woman hanging drowned
In a scene inlayed
With thoughtless flowers,
Which death is it,
Exactly,
That renders Millais' Ophelia
With its beauty?

The work alone has form:
Flora, depth, the colour of minute lights
And the image has concept:
A woman, dead in water.
Ophelia lives in an image and a play:
One moment, one story
Resting on the temporal slopes
Of this painted pinnacle of signs.
Why did Shakespeare write
About a woman pushed to suicide
By the death of her father,
At the hands of a heroic lover feigning Spiritual vacancy
At the request of his own undead parent?
Does every woman share this fate,
Or is it fantasy -
Attaining psychic substance
Through a kind of impossible insanity?
In other words:
Is Ophelia's death,
So chosen by Millais
And Shakespeare in turn
(Whose names are poetry)
A mimetic echo of a million mortal moments?
Or is it the prophecy of a time yet to come
For which death has been moulded
In a looping narrative cast,
Made into a word describing
Some sacred foreseen feature -
Which is it:
Does meaning sink into the past
Or fly into the future?