I hold her negative image
between my fingertips.
I study the X-ray of a face
loved and hated many times–
the alabaster dots replacing
those brown eyes that tripped
the clown, my soul, one day…
when? but yesterday?

The teeth a blackish-gray, apropos
perhaps a corpse but not a dead love.
Hair blonder than Scandinavian sun
entices memory of cold-black beauty.
I hold like a hollow man the negative
to the light, to see through the breasts
I had fondled in joy as the long-running
melodrama returns to the stage but
I no longer sell the tickets, there will be
no audience, the show will flop, and
I will take up gardening for growth is
life and the perforated celluloid which
I hold so gingerly between fingertips is
dead, unalive, inanimate, its enlargement
suitable only for framing in my memory.

Postscript:
Where are the sounds now?
The slammed car doors, the yelling,
the ‘bitch’ calling, the ‘bastard’ calling,
all prompted out of rage and intimate fear
along with the looks, glances trimmed
by a smear of hate, faces badly packed in
anger, ugly…they lie buried now within
love’s treasure chest, beneath the touching,
the emerald speckled kisses and eye-shared
secrets across peopled rooms….

The ugly is buried with the beautiful.