Requiescat - Catherynne Valente

[shinygobonkers]

Requiescat

I dream that you forgive me
and my body turns to water.
Opalescent and pure,
it washes the feet of the moon -
your hands cover my hair
like a monk's hood,
and I am penitent, penitent, penitent.

I kneel. It is difficult.
Paraffin tears pool on the floor
of a mosque I've never seen,
turquoise track wedge between agate
and mother-of-pearl. I raise my eyes to you,
gold as a swinging censer
and my papier-mache throat
cuts itself - my lips crack
under your seraphic teeth
and you swallow the blood
as though my body were
a sacremental cup -
your tongue enters my mouth like a spear.

I need a place to bury you.
A circle of black-jowled earth
where I can embalm you
under shrouds of battered movie screens
with their flicker of selves in mottled silver -
and believe I see absolution
projected there,
your face full of refracted light.

But the camera obscura shows us
right-side up -
for you and I there is only this
room without doors
where lightless flesh is opened
and slick-winged crows
dissect along pancreatic meridians
in order to divine
the level of the water table:
how deep our pockmarked interstices cut.

Out of descending organ hieroglyphs

their feathers drift down like pages
from dream-minarets,

to rest at my feet,
mute and black.