Untitled, Woman with a Flower Head

after Salvador Dali

She appears, woman with her head filled with flowers, gliding through the Spanish desert, in her gown of flesh. She is contemplating a poem by Lorca, the one about the procession in the streets—the bells from the nearby church governing the city towards silence. The woman reenacts the trembling speech of the poem: Who follows her? Who kneels on the hard bone landscape, body born of wale fin and shadow excrement, of mustaches heavier than the face? Is it the weight of cheeks and jaw muscles being pulled toward the earth, as if the poet in question were a fish in a reverse ocean, the copper colored sky; a seascape of canyons where cactus anemones appear, waving emerald green torsos for the woman murmuring with her head filled with flowers.

**

The Dream

After a painting by Salvador Dali

There are a hundred swarming flies where there is an absence of lips. And though the eyelids have been cemented shut, and though her hair may be a wig of limestone, and though her neckline maybe hidden in the green mulch of the afternoon cave where half-naked men wrestle in the strange darkness, and though the figure at the edge of the painting is resting his head in disgust, and though the statue to his right peering over him like an inquisitive owl is merely a reflection of the woman with sewn lips, and though the light is dismal and fading into the dream, into the inventiveness of sleep, and though the sleep itself belongs to the man slobbering on a pillow of his worth —the fixed thermometer of his smile, his antennae of mustache measuring frequency of the dream, and though the poem and the arc of sleep are cousins to the painting; the poet, the artist, and the sleeper equally admit they have all been tortured by the flies.