Lucien Viotti, Madame Mathilde Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud
A wife cannot compete with someone who
Has rhymed himself with vacuum. The blank
A dead friend leaves behind is perfect blue.
The charms a mindless wife can offer rank
More like a lukewarm brown contrasted with
That throbbing agate in a sunset sky.
The poet left behind constructs a myth
About a hero killed, and when his eye
The color of that reverie appears
From elsewhere in the country men call love,
It flashes conquering beauty like the spears
And sword of Patroklus now held above
The death a relic has embalmed with dreams.
That new friend’s stare invades the tomb with screams.
