In Learning How To Die.

Must literature necessitate a character
Asked the author of her muse,
For if she never loved another man
in her remaining languid days
She would not much complain.
She had spent her years fingering sheets
Spreading them smooth beneath her hands
Then drawing her pen across them
Remembering in so many words
the way a woman shudders
When she is made to feel.
And tremble she did - tremble at the sight
of purple mountains
Rising above her like the strong chest of a man
Or tremble she did at the sight of yellow tendrils
Stretching across the pale flesh of the dawn.
But when in the barren desert of life she stood
It was not man who caught her falling sweat,
But the open amorous lips of a red tulip
at her ankle
Sprouting form the life that spilled from her pen.
For where there is blood, there is clearly life
And she bled black like St. George’s monster
Leaving little rivers of ink behind her open veins.
And though she flirted with cancer in search of a feeling
Or danced with death in want of a verb
Or seduced the delicate sympathies of suicide
If only to produce a metaphor
even more real than its inspiration
At least in learning how to die -
or so she told Peter and his golden gates -
She had learned how to live.