The Symposium of Drowning

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” —TS Eliot

I. 

There is no greater crowd pleaser

than a pretty dead girl,

especially the drowned variety.

You know the scene: hair, 

an endless black matted mess,

picking the sticky leeches off her like jewelry.

A real Lady Lazarus knockout. 

Seaweed holding her like a lullaby,

the cataract-white skin 

bloated to a sizable perfection.

Her nude body wide open, unfolded,

a lexicon of flesh.

A real Laura Palmer daydream, 

but already rarefied, canonized,

already every dead girl’s fantasy. 

 

II.

Every crime scene is a masterpiece. 

The bloodstain pattern an opera,

no, a symphonatic, ultraviolet firework show

somewhere between  

a Twombly and a Pollock.

But the pathology of life evaded her 

long before the drowning.

Bodies of water can’t be dusted,

liquids hold no fingerprints, no trauma.

Obtuse black-blue contusions

of waves fold over the decimals of life. 

 

III. 

Rusalka’s Google Search History:   

am i a ghostt>>??

am I a ghost?

How do I know if im a ghost?

ghost test

How to haunt you’re killer

How to haunt your killer

 

IV. 

I undress her down 

to a nudity she has never seen before.

Past the skin, past the bones,

her glowing spleen, each masterful rib, 

the delicate ossuary. 

Her feet are two different sizes. 

She has partial heterochromia, 

an all-seeing Rothko painting.

Blood is type O negative 

with a slight iron deficiency.

Clockmakers rely on witness marks 

inside clocks to know 

how they were built: 

the mind of the architect. 

People are the same way, 

The tiny scar above her lip 

tells the story of her childhood fall.

The sun sends her body secret messages 

in the form of freckles, 

a language of glittering melanoma. 

She has attached earlobes and mid-digital hair, 

both genetic anomalies, and 

a mole the shape of my favorite instrument.

Just like that I know her more intimately

than she knew herself.

I sew her up like a brand new dress.

She does wear it so well. 

 

V. 

Mushroom picking in the graveyard, 

I hide the Amanita Muscaria in my pockets.

I’m small and I don’t know what poison is yet. 

Why make something so beautiful so deadly?

Grandmother tells me about Rusalka, 

the onyx-haired woman who was drowned,

now forever haunting the lake 

inside the murky morass. 

Her name to me sounds brittle, 

Like salty seaweed cracking under the sun or 

the opening of an oyster, 

“Rusalka,” it brags, while I knife it. 

This one produces no pearls. 

Nature makes beautiful things deadly 

so we pay attention, 

so our senses are hit & keen. 

And yet despite all this, 

we still take the poison smiling. 

 

VI.

Do you remember when I lived in my body?

How my eyelids would melt over white, blue, wet, 

a hundred times a day shuttering like storm windows. 

What I would give just to have some

or any hair that went down the shower drain,

even one memento of my living self. 

A nail clipping, eyelash; 

saliva from a postage stamp.

Ghosts don’t haunt homes or people,

they haunt lost pieces of themselves.

The iotas, tendrils, infinitesimal colors of time, wailing, 

a molecule of breathe, vestige of dust, 

a lost letter inside a grandfather clock, a key, 

so to put life back together.

For now I fill my seams & hollows

with pearls & shells because I 

can’t remember what lungs feel like.

How many times did I regenerate my liver

and how many times did my tongue unfold

like a red carpet for a lover?

My veins once held my information 

like a treasure map to build another me.

Oh blood for even a femtosecond. 

I wish for every cavernous object to be a seashell, 

so we have the ability to hear its past life.

You put my shoe to your ear and 

hear me walking away from you forever.

I put your ear to mine 

and hear nothing at all.