From Black Mountain

  North Carolina

Forgive me before I go.
You said I would leave you
like all the others left you.
I have learned nothing
your lips were sealed to say
because you hoped for rain
to cool the Southern earth
and keep your skin soft
as ice floating the Atlantic.

Mary Shelley’s monster walks
the Arctic in her horror story
composed the night the doctor
awards her his prize,
and she reads Frankenstein
to all the castle’s shadows:
Polidori, desirous Claire,
Byron, and her husband
not long before he drowned.

I climb Black Mountain
where silence is poetry
living now on the other side.
Here’s only the poet and you,
two bodies plucked
from graves on separate nights:
his aging skin, your proud heart.
You were two bodies sewed
together to make one.

(21 December 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander