A Thing Like Death (Poem)

Instead of commenting on a poem today, I thought I'd give you one of my own that I've been sitting on for a while from Browns and Rusts.

Feedcrack welcome.

* * * *

A Thing like Death
(On Rose of Sharon)

What was it Juliet said? Not nomenclature of rose
or Romeo. Not to Lawrence about lurking beneath
serpents’ skin or lying with dead men’s bones. Not
to the vial about this conceit of death and night,

receptacle of flesh and memory. But in the tomb,
after she’d bent to plant one on her husband’s corpse,
to divert his rigor into the troubled pool of her flesh.
As she thrust his knife through the adolescent bloom

of her breast—This is thy sheath. Thy vessel. A peephole
through my skin into the serpent’s mouth. Come see
how it’s used your rib to pick our future from its teeth,
how its venom floods the amniotic sac of my soul. Come

see me in this woman whose rose hangs like a bloodstain
over her bosom, stem slinking down her navel
and between closed legs like my blood pooled and snaked
as I fell at last against your hardening flesh. Come see

how our tragedy broods over this purgatorial plain
spread thick with the lamentation and promise
of apocalypse, how the bodies, old garments shed,
forever rise toward some slit in her tendriled mane,

how they twist to face the mystery beyond
the vaginal threshold, how the trio in the top left quarter
hangs near enough rebirth to blossom into longing
beyond the artist’s red stain.