and I know better.

Dead Girls

DEAD GIRLS

show up often in the movies, facedown

in the weeds beside the highway.

Kids find them by the river, or in the woods,

under leaves, one pink-nailed hand thrust up.

Detectives stand over them in studio apartments

or lift their photos off pianos

in the houses they almost grew up in.

A dead girl can kick a movie into gear

better than a saloon brawl, better

than a factory explosion, just

by lying there. Anyone can play her,

any child off the street

can be hog-tied and dumped from a van

or strangled blue in a kitchen, a bathroom,

an alley, a school. That’s the beauty

of a dead girl. Even a plain one

who feels worthless

as a clod of dirt, broken

by the sorrow of gazing all day

at a fashion magazine,

can be made whole, redeemed

by what she finally can’t help being,

the center of attention, the special,

desirable, dead, dead girl.

Echo and Narcissus

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

Poor love-struck Echo, stuck with repeating

everything he said. He might

have thought he deserved it,

to have a nymph for a girlfriend, who’d confirm

everything he said; he might

have loved how she mirrored him,

a girlfriend who’d say You’re pretty

when he told her she was pretty,

who’d love him more than her mirror.

Not that they had mirrors in those days;

that was the problem. Anyway, she was pretty,

but he wasn’t interested in nymphs.

If only they’d had mirrors in those days

he wouldn’t have drowned in that reflecting pool,

finding it more interesting than nymphs.

But maybe he’d have hit his head against a mirror

if there’d been one instead of a pool, and died anyway.

No free will in those days—it was all the gods.

You could beat your head against your fate, but still,

if you were Narcissus, you’d end up a white flower

stuck in the ground with no will, plucked or trampled by gods,

and someone would say it was deserved,

for beauty to come down to a white flower,

a poor echo, and someone’s love stuck

in the ground, the ground, the ground, the ground.

Eating Together

EATING TOGETHER

I know my friend is going,

though she still sits there

across from me in the restaurant,

and leans over the table to dip

her bread in the oil on my plate; I know

how thick her hair used to be,

and what it takes for her to discard

her man’s cap partway through our meal,

to look straight at the young waiter

and smile when he asks

how we are liking it. She eats

as though starving—chicken, dolmata,

the buttery flakes of filo—

and what’s killing her

eats, too. I watch her lift

a glistening black olive and peel

the meat from the pit, watch

her fine long fingers, and her face,