EULOGY

Eating up the flames shooting out of the moon, you said there weren’t any, so what did I fill up on then? Like cigarettes, I could leave right now, disappear mythically, it wouldn’t take much effort, a rip, a snap, a unicorn looking at itself in the mirror, death is a smiling affair but I have never practiced archery, bending like that, and I have not unbraided my hair, have not undressed, all that is showing are my bare shoulders in a frame of white smoke and bleached out red roses like a photograph.

There were sheets of paper spread out around me like a skirt, I wrote some things down in black bows of bull’s velvet, solid loops like ornamental ironwork on a balcony, a place to walk out on overlooking the tops of the olive trees, and, leaning against the sky, you said there was no ground to lay your flowers on, but you had no bouquet, let alone no dead to mourn, their smiles disturbing the horses, so I said pointing, look, wasn’t I sprouting petals from my waist, wasn’t the skin of my stomach open and hungry for ditch water like an abandoned grave, wasn’t my skirt blooming like sheets of paper, like a tablecloth floating up in the wind blowing in from the hollow tombs set inside the hills, where the dampness whines in its loneliness, shaking the dishes and toppling the candles and making the peaches roll off the edge, didn’t they puncture the dry ground with the pink squish of their juicy fall, the thudding sound black and slick as a whistle calling wild dogs to gather below the flat brim of my skirt, and you stood there as if before an opera stage, and the slitted curtain embroidered like Flora’s undergarments opened, my leg emerging straight from these ruffles like a line of light slanting down from a night window, perfect as the white part in the middle of dark Spanish hair, didn’t your hands walk this landscape, as if walking the plank, weren’t you ready to die there in the shade of my bolero, strangled by my braid, so, I leaned against the sun, silhouetted, chin up, and, pointing at my waist, didn’t I say, look at those dogs shivering and howling there in the pit of my navel, the way true romance does, on the soft dead ground beneath the hard sky, they are speaking, offering us a watery death, sweet and guaranteed as the tips are sharp on yuccas, see how their fur is caught on the edges of those serrated green blades, each hair curling in the heat of my breath like an intricate peineta, and so you pulled at both arms of the black bow, loops unfurled, bull skin peeled, writing erased, the sad spikes of my eyelashes licked like a fork, lips slicked back in a dead smile, teeth white as my skirt where I wrote some things down, and, wanting to read, you ripped, and sliced open, only to find it was your own stomach you were pawing at, digging at the base of your heavy tombstone, final as a eulogy, everything written in your own ink as you carved out your death date, hung ribbons on a wreath over your door, mauve as a wilted rose, shadow like the inside of a gardenia tossed into the sun’s burning face, didn’t the crowd cheer, beaming its smile down onto the soil where you ran all over the place, sprinkling my hollow belly with bouquet after bouquet, your white paw prints like confetti on my skin, an ornate obituary, those promised love letters thrown from the far ridge, above the olive trees growing atop the tombs set inside those haunted hills, between my breasts, the closest place to the sky where the spilt wine and the juices from peaches collect, where all the blood and hurt and howling compacts, a hard place to walk out on where clouds crack, shot through with arrows, straight and carnal, toppling over the flower vases on the table as we ate ourselves, forks and knives, stampeded velvet, bending like that, pushing over the candles, didn’t their starry blooms burst from windows and doors, un acto de violencia con rosas, and as the sun lay down in my ground, petal by petal was torn out of my body, because the dead are hungry and the dead are delicious, and what is dug up and replanted every year, bones raided, looted breath, is what allows us to walk out on top of the sunset, color of pain, stable, if but a little soft just the way you prefer it in the cemetery, where you said, still, there wasn’t any ground to lay your flowers on, but you had no feet and you had no hands, and, I looked at you, eating at my table, smelling the smoke around my shoulders, standing on my dress, and you didn’t even exist in a photograph.

Like cigarettes, so earthquakes; their habits, their dead dreams, their diets, their insatiable need to inhale, like cigarette after cigarette, cloud after white cloud, the lace in my skirt, all the layers of pages, folding the cloth in, crumpling and stopping up the hole to their tombs with everything spread out around me until I stood stripped and naked as the sun, naked as everything was before it had been written about. Did you love me, did you love me not, or did I eat way too many stars as they jumped out the window, their pulpy juice choking me, my hair floating in the heat thrown from their flames?

Flor de izote crowning the sharp green blades, as we climbed they cut off our hands and feet. Everything must be done now with our tongues dipped in the decay of our dearly departed.