Why I Did Not Make Love to Your Dead Body

Shouldn’t it be romantic

        to think to take you

    in that final, leaden state

—slowed mercury? Yet,

        coming upon your corpse

    excited me not

to love—but to something

        akin to autism. I was a rock

     that dream, swaying.

No lie—I’ll

        cradle you after

     death if I am able, babble

and coo into your neck

        as if you were my

    boy—some young

thing-I-made. But last night

        in the dendrite grove

    I could not toy

with you. Other times

        we’ve been machine

    —a polyphonic loom

when we living

        loved, fabricating from ooze

     and slap laughter—your sweet

scratch on my coffin-back: sign

        I was the way you chose

     (choose) out of death.

In the dream you passed

        through some portal

    not-me. I neither

held you like I have

        our children nor

     brought your body back

to sense by training skin-upon-skin

        to call it:

     it should work that way.

Instead I left you

        under trees, the indicating

     pines perpendicular—

pointing godward, a place

        where things I’ve made

     with my body are maybe

poems, but

        —nothing else at all.

Poem by Kirsten Kaschock