Death of a Muse

It doesn’t show on my face because it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

Morphine, mother’s milk, opiate sleep, our history de saudade: the most important part is that we have tried to stop again and again and it has never once worked. The rose quartz around my neck split in half without me noticing. The rings are beginning to rust. I am hiding my face. It’s time, we can admit now that separation excites. It must. Because I have another eye that hasn’t blinked in a thousand years and I knew it never would have worked. We only resemble each other on the inside. But I’m human, I wanted to try. If you listen closely, the wind dying down sounds a lot like absence, or the death rattle of stars. I can’t hear you in my dreams anymore. My body remembers even when I try to forget. Your letters and my diamonds will outlast both of us. As for us, we can’t ever go back there to that island, that oceanic weightlessness. Vicarious vicissitudes. Lingering. I know, it hurts. I’m not too proud to avoid likening myself to Eurydice. And you, Orpheus, please, even if it means you sulk or sob, don’t look back at me: the past is glass that shatters when you try and reach into it. You’ll ruin your pretty hands. Gaze too far back and you swing around to the future: me with someone else, not knowing you, ennui, years spent desperate and unhappy in the bottom of an empty chalice. An unmade bed that resembles a coffin. Everyone else isn’t, anymore. This is how Ecclesiastes goes: it all returns to dust. Mourning adorning and billowing, black lace. The bone of your knuckle gently protruding, the crueler bend of your collarbone. Yet softness. The husky urgency with which you hold your breath when you didn’t want me to notice your desire. The piercing, spiral jetty and the spray off the railing of the ferry. Who’s left to smile seeing the polaroids of us? Did I imagine them all? There are hours and miles between us which we cannot hope to traverse. You have always mistaken me for an iciness, an apathy which is anathemic to the romantic. But this is why I’ve been keeping away from you: my stomach is gaping open and I’m holding my insides in my hands. It’s a mess. I’m heavy, I have the same weight as all the dead perched on my shoulder. It doesn’t show on my face because it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. My father and my mother in their own ways taught me how to endure.