LeeAnn Olivier

David Bowie Is

In April New York skies are sheets of poplin dipped
in pewter. Acid rain casts a purple sheen on trash bags
skirting the streets, plastic flashing wet as grackles.

They sparkle like falling stars, so I make a wish anyway
and slip inside the Brooklyn Museum, its house of mirrors,
catacombs sprawled out like maps of fungi bubbling

underground. Here I’m a specter creeping through
the Starman’s cerebral sparks, headset caging my brain
in glamour. I left you in Texas to thrash and flail. I left you

in Texas to slip and wail in your own spilled guts, your
animalian anger a caterwaul, a yowl, an ultraviolet
noise that ripped my ribs apart, your fist of love

a hammer above my head. Grief inflates, a lead
balloon in my chest, my limbs liquid metal melting
into the gallery floor. But David Bowie is Lazarus,

is Lucifer, his left eye the horned moon of a black-star
I want to bask in. I’m a speck of space debris dancing
in his velvet vacuum, vespertine and reverent. I’m a

dilettante, a cosmonaut piloting his planet, resurrecting
the spectrum where he saunters and furs, his right eye
earthshine shivering down upon me like the chrome

of a quiet sun, his baritone a crossbreed of croon and snarl
coaxing your poison from my lungs, his flowing coats cinched
in to a wasp waist, leotards lean as cats. David Bowie is

mending the splits in my psyche. You love me, you love me
not. You’re a beast in yogi’s clothing. On the day of your
execution women will kneel and smile. I left you in Texas

to burn and keen, I left you in Texas to cackle and crow.
David Bowie is teaching me that everything changes. Like
the old gods, he is showing me my ship knows where to go.