She lies there, full length long, upon her bed,

Upon her body not a stitch of clothing,

With eyes whose look demands of you with loathing:

'Can you not see that I'm already dead?

Perhaps, though, you're a necrophiliac?

Then go ahead and free the fearsome beast

That's thrusting at your pants to be released

And, neath your pumping sacroiliac,

'Lymphatic, clammy-skinned, with scarce a breath,

Eyes following the fissures in the ceiling,

I'll think about my tepid blood congealing,

My weary fingers stiffening, in death.'...

You fumble for the hundred-dollar fee

And drop it on the mantelpiece, and flee.

[Goya painted The Black Duchess in 1797, not long after her husband's death. Though commissioned to paint her several times, this portrait he kept for the rest of his life. Chica is Spanish for a young woman.]

In Herbert Draper's painting, several sirens

Cling to the fittings of Ulysses' galley,

Suing to escape its briny environs

While tone-deaf oarsmen strive to foil their sally.

Ulysses, mast-bound at Circe's behest

(That he, unfree to help, should hear their need

Having bidden two seamen bind his breast

Ever tighter, should he beg to be freed)

Strains against the breath-repressing hessian

That ignites his flesh with a white-hot burning,

Begging, in vain, for Godly intercession,

Having heard the star-stricken maidens' yearning

(Eloquent in every word of their song)

To return to the world where they belong.

[The original story is found in book 12 of Homer's Odyssey. In Draper's Victorian version, the sirens are transformed from malign partly-human creatures who lure sailors to their destruction, into damsels in distress hoping in vain to escape an ancient malediction.]

He saw them in a doorway, sprung to light

By a sudden, irruptive firebolt's flash,

Till blackness and the bus's headlong dash

Extinguished them; then he canvassed the sight,

This poignant afterimage of a pair

Summoned so abruptly out of the dark,

Him bent over her like a question mark

Seeming, in the inquisitional glare,

As though a puppet master, blackly veiled,

Had pressed the pair together, hips and thighs,

Fingers and legs and lips, while yet their eyes

Stared frenziedly askance, as if they quailed,

From what? the raging storm? my prying stare?

Or giving in to one more love-affair?

Lizzie, Rossetti's lover, was his model

(Pallid-skinned, her hair a coppery torrent),

Though freewheeling-he thought marriage abhorrent,

Monogamy puritanical twaddle.

Irked by serfdom, ten years later she fled

To study art; her health was on the wane

And laudanum, to mollify the pain,

Followed, like an assassin, in her tread.

Told that she was ailing, gutted by shame

At having, for a decade, loathly dallied,

He hurried to her side and, when she rallied,

Married her. With child, how blithe she became,

Till the babe was stillborn. Desolate-eyed,

She double-dosed, and fell asleep, and died.