Inviolate

The swimming pool misses the shape
of her body: a displacement
in space-time, as washing machines
remove all trace of her lipstick
from pillows and sheets. The contents
of her stomach, like fine wine racked
on the coroner’s shelf, mature
as she never will: tell a tale
of barbiturates, of acid-
love burning the pit of a perfect
stomach. As if Hell were in Heaven,
behind the same gates and below
the same beating heart, now stilled, now
chilled. The flash of her axons, bulb-
bright as Broadway when the angels
foreclose, when her name is unpicked
like autopsy sutures from tabloid-
white skin. And I can’t get aroused,
for her films are sick zombie flicks,
in which celluloid preserves flesh
against touch. She is inviolate
too late; in this Age of size-zero
skeletons, she is thinner by far,
by virtue of shedding the weight
of Life: no more than photons, seen
leaving Earth at the speed of light,
one star scattered between billions,
one more icon formed dot-to-dot,
as the eye shapes constellations
from chaos, fits her face to the Golden
Rule... So I look into the Moon’s
cool chlorine reflection... and dive.