Incense and fragility, she brings death

to slow music and the absence of weight

that's felt in your footsteps is the fading

of favourite songs. She accumulates,

causing peripheral blindness, lunar

eclipses and narrowing eyelids

obscuring familiar haunts. White powdered

exquisitely porcelain shoulders, bound

by black satin, faint lipstick smudges

and traces of blood on the tongue. Love is

posthumous, requesting no flowers,

artless inscriptions, the wearing of weeds

and a portrait judiciously hung.