“I will die completely cured.”
-Salvador Dali

On our last night we stared for five minutes at van Gogh’s Skull
of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette & I asked if he meant it
as an anti-smoking lesson. Libby laughed, her hair like Clouds
-era Joni Mitchell buoyant as her shoulders shook. We spent

that summer cross-legged in front of paintings she translated
into poems: Landscapes are like sonnets, she would say, & Dali
paints only odes. I nodded, told her how close I was to getting it:
a job, an apartment, the shortest route uptown & up the back

stairwell to meet her, how to write poems that could be headed
by brutal stick-figure scenes instead of titles. Human sculptures
creeped me out the most, the threat of having my head forever
rolled & bronzed. What greater gift could there be than being

forgotten? Maybe Dali meant our greatest cures are red velvet
curtains in a windowless room, an underground tomb guarded
in eternity by a terra-cotta infantry. & above ground, we remain
defenseless, picking up what’s within reach. This knife is just

a bullhorn I sharpened with my teeth. Running away is a retreat
only if announced by a bugle & a band of screams. Maybe
Dali meant dying too is a cure. Libby would know. Beneath
the trees in the sculpture garden, she would say What he meant

is a prose poem with no line breaks. Her hands over my eyes,
she would whisper What he meant is I get a head start this time,
then race ahead of me, her laugh careening beyond the weeping
beeches & into the narrow streets, a parade at last unloosed.