Leda Revisited

The best way to get over someone is to get under someone.

—Mae West

Maybe this is the real myth: I take a shape-

shifter, an all-father, for a lover, hard

and fast. Ardently we bite back grief, then sleep,

curled wolves, his teeth at the top of my spine,

his adamant thigh thrust between mine, a scythe

parting wheat. And you would squirm to hear how I spoon-

feed him my ripe sex. For six weeks each dawn

I gather my strewn bones from around his bed, our

couplings are little holocausts, leaving my body

bruised but luminary, bright spinal knurls flecked

against the wall, a Pollock painting, until

your ghost crawls to the lip of my dream, surfacing

as sure as film on boiled milk. Only then

an aluminum mourning creeps tight in my throat,

the wails of a Chinese opera, my intestines

cut into sections on the bathroom floor. Doubled

over for days with strange bedfellows

waltzing in the pitch of my gut, I give

my body over to grieving. My jaw goes

slack, the pill bottle clacks against the night

table, white and clean as a swan.