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By Christine Crow Just like that time you lost your shoe and I took your arm to steady you I think that last indignity of dying was something of a concession: breach of that rigorous control that kept you wary of emotional excess. How often now, lying alone here, watching the shadows, I feel your strange body reflower into nothingness, gaze with attention at your slow disappearance. After such distance it's like a peepshow, almost ecstatic, in an odd kind of way. Tenderly now I give birth to you, no, pull you back into me (must be breech-birth or something played backwards) like some crazy rescue party, some great body-stocking with me on the outside looking in. Head first, courageous as you were in life, you pass back up through me. Eyelids closed. I feel you entering, back where you always were in fantasy, back through my caverns, my strange vocal chambers, my neck, my fangs, my serpent crown. Now, like those ancient tribesmen who devoured lions for strength, I have your courage inside me. Your shield, your winged sandals, the little leather bag made of your skin. You are in my mouth now, tenderly held, like a baby crocodile. All precious separation between us banished, you see through my eyes, move with my body, speak with my mouth. Only from the photo on the wall do your own eyes still follow me, familiar bee-stings full of reality, you-ness, difference, and that old rigor which drew me to you in the first place. Tenderly now as I pass a hundred times before it, you reproach me for my crazed Romantic extravagance, my intolerable breach of good taste. The lot.
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