The Oval Portrait

to Margarete

“Your hair holds a whole dream.”
- Charles Baudelaire

The image must begin with an aversion:
the trophy hair, detached
from the head of the woman
he once loved, covers the canvas--

preserved, now, against the wall
of the museum, where we will
never find the face, only the obscure
half of the lover's head, as Eurydice.

It is this that the artist has suffered
to reproduce using Margarete’s hair--
manipulating the soft spot of our objectivity,
where form and body are set asunder,

to assure us that the nightmare
which we view is human.

Body Language

“It beggar’d all description”
- Anthony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare

You could anchor the tip of your tongue
in my mouth and sing my diagnosis--

sing through the spaces of my body,
as if it had surfaced out of Lethe,

filling each blank with your breath:
only then would each caesura ring true,

my paraphasia-medic,
in the sieve of your mouth

with the song that would sing out
my drowning.