by Catherine Owen
Seeing you dead reminded me of a hobby
I once had. It all started when Lennon was shot
and his glasses flew off his face and landed in the road
like a fragile owl and this was the beginning of mortality
for me. I would spend hours staring at the inside of album
covers, starting with the Beatles Best Of, its wrongly immortal
portraits of the boys in black & white, too pure for blood,
ending with the Crue's sordid lady boys in leather & studs,
a pentagram rising behind them, the dark sun of all I now
knew. Maybe it wasn't a hobby, more like an obsession,
a meditation, as if my watching the innards of record covers
would protect these tenuous gods, or, in the case of John,
reverse his wounds, remove him to some other street
in New York where he could cross, with Yoko, unharmed.
But that was years ago, albums are gone with their giant,
occult artwork, their shrines and you decided,
before we pulled the plug, to donate your fathomable blue
eyes to science.
Catherine Owen, very likely, is a crow in human form.
