When I die, I will miss
A woman’s long hair in the wind,
Not a timeless thing, but a thing
Without concern for time,
The way Rome always reminds
Of Greece, and Greece reminds
Of salt air and vines.

Death undoes itself like a woman undoes her dress
With knowing look and shrewd-salt of beguilement
Of supple shoulders and bared back, of life shimmying
Down the legs of the longest dark road of disappearing.

The goddess of the spent moon skulks to her feathery bed of fiery dawn.
Wrens through the uplands wend the fence weft with piecemeal straw.
Lips painted like pomegranate groves, dashed with fructifying sweets.
A kiss is a far-off and warm opening of lips like the sun into forest gleams.

The lit fuse of her lips touching off
A din in the black powdery night:
Illumined and immolated am I.

Death is the dictionary of unknown words,
Written on the pages of the unbound book
Of earth and sea ~~ to no one, its soliloquy.

The farmhand burns the leaves, though the bodies of slaves
Lie at heaven’s impasse in the trees of dying looks, barring them
From peaceful death, the sad emulsified perch of love and heat,
Hung at noon like John Brown untended, bearded of sticky summer,
Heavy-headed swinging noon and the smell of honeysuckle blood,
Fetid day like the coming dirt of graves, the clinging air of disease,
Snake-winding down from the trees with no pleasure of the bitten apple.

Polyurethanized love,
Polyols and isocyanates
And one part dove.