Persephone
       

Again she goes aground, seeking love
in the mouths of the little fish

nibbling the vein-blue toes
of the shipwrecked. Death being male

marries the body. Her white hand
dripping on the oar as the ferryman,

whistling Dixie, remarks, but hasn't she
come here before? Enough times perhaps

to memorize the iridescent sky
of the underground,

or how the last breath repeats
into the back of the throat, moth-winged,

or the pivot the blood makes
to interfere with the act,

as if his memory were a thing,
like a spearhead, the body

could dislodge. Now she sees it
appear on the water: the tower

made of ash and teeth: the crowning
minarets positioned above

stately double doors, and the nearly
perceptible stillness beneath.

Yet having these,
the decomposing wealth of the aeons

he summons he
r from the gaze of heaven,

tasked with the impossible:
to be a wife

in the place where nothing lives.
Death being male

marries the body, but only
to mine is he faithful. For the first

thousand years she watches his breathing
in the night and feels something,

not love, a sort of grief
that hardens into a body

and becomes hers, sneaking out
to the libraries in order to learn

the language of the earthworms,
to become, if nothing else

less a tourist. But all they said was
My Lady, not My Lady, when did you realize

that you would never be free?
For five thousand years she wore

his body so well that she saw it
in all things: stars, moon,

their reflection on the iridescent sky,
and pretended that the beauty

of her sorrow was enough. Now
she enters the widening hall

of her home, descending the stairs
past the multiple colored layers

with her just-pubescent feet
vanishing on the marble

as far above the ocean
a gate of winds opens, hinges

smooth as the first winter,
and I toss awake

to a chill in the bedsheets
and the howling of some distant dog.

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Copyright © 2018 Brian Sneeden All rights reserved
from Last City
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission