Shameless

by Robert Gross

My dead lover returns
on his pale torso wounds
the size of ravens’s eggs

Which don’t heal when
you’re dead he tells me
but don’t hurt either

I know he’s dead because
he wouldn’t let me see them
if he were alive

He says I just came by
to see how you’re doing
He sprawls on the sofa

I used to wear a blindfold
when we had sex I learned
to spin a fantasy and he

was only ardent when unseen
embarrassed by his body
long before the cancer sapped it

I only saw him naked
a week before he died
even then he didn’t know

and would have ordered
me out of the sickroom
but the dead have no shame

at what they exhibit and
the survivors learn at length
to be indifferent too