For Lee Miller

In the bleak washroom,
its motel-cramp, your elf’s face
cynical, tired. The metronome
poised below your eyes, a demoiselle
out of Picasso, the glow dimmed
that has flooded the darkrooms
of so many hearts, luminous one.
The little Fuhrer watches you bathe
from his frame on the bath’s corner, fist
at his hip, chest thrust out;
often he must have stood
to attention in the shower,
practising faces, the pipes applauding
DA DA dada dada       DAA DAA dada dada –
you’ll write for Vogue that the place is
well-stocked with wines and whiskeys,
for a teetotaller: Berchtesgarten.
Heated walls, you wired back in June
from Cologne, and the bloody, clawed handmarks
of the roasting victims baked like the designs
on pottery. The inhabitants must have known.
Now steam mars his pristine grey tiles:
a ghost of fingerprints near the tap.
Pierrot completes the set.
Facing him, on a polished table
a foot-high nude stroking her stone-blonde hair,
elbow mimicking your elbow’s gesture
for washing a collarbone, alabaster.
And do your triptych of faces consciously echo
that threesome you described as the hangover
to a great party you just missed in Leipzig:
in one of the offices, a grey-haired man
at his desk with head bowed
on crossed hands; sprawled in a chair
his faded wife, a stitch of blood down her chin;
dusty nurse-daughter with pretty teeth
stretched on the sofa in dreamless sleep?
that SS guard you snapped, his face
moon-white beneath the glass canal?
Her breasts and stomach are waxen, bulge
like yours in those maddening photographs
taken by your Pygmalion father
when you were twenty-one.
Your boots queue like men:
fecit Hitler’s bathmat with the Dachau mud.