The Artist Held in Memory

Before a landscape in a gilded frame,
I feed on silence and white walls.
What is memory, except some hope
In face of the intractable world?

A voice tells me to forget my body.
Let a decade of desire fall to the floor
Like the crumbling folds of a silk robe.
Our flesh will only inherit loneliness.

The wounded wait a cure – the dead  
Wait to rise. When sunlight breaks 
Through the leaves with a shine 
Of glycerin, I wait to see him again.

Even at night, when I kissed his lips,
The odor of balsam lingered in his hair.
It comes here now, among the whispers
And a hum of manufactured air.