Making Love to Corpses

She sears into me like the morning sun.   
I turn 
See her reflected on the window panes 
Floating above a world rushing past 
Superimposed on every sound it cast. 

The world slows as her body wakens 
from half slumber. She straightens 
Her image glazed with sunlight 
lost now from yearning sight 
in the end, a coward’s plight.

I think she moves, I cannot see. I hear 
The thresh of feet upon a gray floor 
The whine of the carriage as it slowed 
The sound of bodies leaning, careening, 
the hiss of doors, and loud bright 
all destroying sunlight. 

She was a love I once had loved 
In misty mornings against a crumbling wall 
Her dark hair lined with chalk, I kissed, 
Crumbling, and displayed within my fist. 

This will happen to us she said. 
Never. The sun was a rush of light 
In whose shadows we’d always delight. 
Away from the eye of passerby, 
The panting eye of passerby. 

Look at them go, she said. Look how they crawl. 
Her mouth was delicious, twisted in a drawl 
Her shape was a vision of what it could be 
a melody of the momentary, 
Now cast into a corpse of timeless life. 

O’ aged wine in windowed glass, so many years have lonely passed, 
Fingertips have faded, my hair trembles with your sigh no more. 

And I make love to the dead 
Grey flesh thrusts beneath me 
Cries inarticulate into my ears 
through the years 
cacophonies of love. 

There were those moments of perfection 
of bodies colored in hues of life, 
of complete sublimation into vales of delight 
Flesh tangled into flesh, skin melded into skin, 
eyes seared, brighter than suns. 

But moans that should burrow through bone into warren 
of secret selves no longer barren…   
Did not appear. 

we should have burrowed through our surfaces 
expecting familiar suns… 

I touched, I remember, a skin I could not pass, 
It still feels to my senses like the day before the last, 
As if I were drowning in a dream of the past.