From Forest Park Fragments

Her hair longer now, falling away from the skull, legs radiant with cancer she smiled giddy as a harlot

mother of mine halfeaten in the dream. The housecoat about to fall, she shuffled in it, brightest eyes

free from the mind in sleep rives sleep to brightest day, the naked and their relics (gifts, rewards the spirit gives again)

My mother as the whore - lolling obscenely through the dream, giggling with her half- lit companions of the dead, cruising through the city of graves, legs bandaged

in an open housecoat the crawling pelt alive below her belly and the belly a wrinkled buddha's face winking through the folds of soiled rayon.

She had died of cancer, her legs luminous in death, she shuffled lewdly, the stained clothes chafing and slipping, she murmurs "syphilis my sweet syphilis the rot of it - calls you back -- to inhabit my flour white flesh again."