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Small Couplets on
One Passion of the Dead
By: Young
Smith |
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Late at night
the dead come to admire our bodies. With slow
fingers they discover each blade of
our ribs, each seam of
our tendons, each groove of our spines. Kneeling for
hours beside our beds, they
touch our moles and our
birthmarks, our wrinkles, our scars. They trace the
curves of our noses. They count the
fillings in our teeth. The dead are
careful not to wake us. They have no
desire for conversation. They are
slightly ashamed to be in our rooms at all. Yet they
cannot turn away. Our beauty
confounds them as they watch
the blood move the veins on the backs of our hands. |
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My Achilles
I think of you
always there in the
court of Lycomedes, where your
mother— sorrowing
nymph— hoped to hide
you as a girl from
the fate of heroes; not
yet the key to the
poet’s vaulting
design, still a thing of jewels
and gossip, a
gleaming ornament, like
the rest— one of those drowsy virgins
scattered on
the rugs, spinning flax,
plaiting
garlands, dressing the
urns with sprigs of
crocus and vetch. Soon enough,
of course, the plot—the
noise of bronze, the steam of corpse fires… And yet always in my version of events, you never
leave never solves your mother’s
ruse, so that even
now you are there, combing wool on the floor among that
white company of
maidens— your hair damp with
rosewater, your eyes veiled with muslin, your slender
arms bright with
the oil and myrrh— forever
something whispered,
something lyric and
small— forever one of those sashed and lovely
women sighing on the
rugs whose stories
were never cruel enough to tell. |
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