beandom accompaniment

Slow Death

People doing what needs to be done,

tread their tongues to mouth

the end of a lover’s name.

Empty sound escapes

as if they are screaming

at the bottom of a lake.

Saint John sealed both of my eyes

in the middle of the night,

pistol in his left hand, furious.

Night is for loving or sleeping, he said.

I can do neither so I let him blind me,

drive his fingers into me until I believe

every word he says about the long lengths

of men, that there are no flat surfaces in the dark.

When he leaves I see Mary walking on water.

She carries a magazine in her left hand

and its pages are open to clean faces

performing the functions of divorce,

foreheads split in two from a pale hand

forcing in a stripped screw. The holes

of their ears are hooked to the concrete

and drying up across the floor.

I know now that nothing can be rebuilt.

The ordinary man has to pay for repairs.

Mary holds my hand for longer than usual,

strange, turbulent, not speaking. I ask

if everything is capable of being broken.

This is a fixed disaster, she says.

It is both linear and circular.

You are both circle and line.

Ophelia became the swamp

and I wish to be her crooked body

kicked and torn and beaten.

What a romantic way to be,

fused with dark morning rain

death’s stamp on shining cheeks.