I don't usually indulge in this sort of thing, but Elizab...

I don't usually indulge in this sort of thing, but Elizabeth Taylor was very special to me and she was very special to my mother and my mother's mother. This is from Ghost of Fashion. I know I have many other poems about her, but this one, I think, says what I want to say for now.
Three's Inheritance

I appear to you in this amalgamation, alive eternally

in that facet of myself not subject to fire, hovering

like grace over precious metal. With a gentle finger

unclasp the watch face I transformed with garnet,

amethyst, and diamond into a brooch, numinous,

my body alive again. And you, in your thirtieth year,

will hold it like a dead baby, old already, turn it

over to see, scratched with the point of a pin, 1870.

I don't remember. I only know. I asked a jeweler

to set pearls in a horseshoe on the roman numeral

which is lucky (three), and on the twelve and six,

enameled flowers meant to mean the hours I spent

blotto, a house and garden, divorce, a tennis court

all refracted in my menagerie of jewelry. I hope

skin has memory and your lapel is whispering

this legacy: the sun was once a vain and stupid girl.

I was once your mother's mother. Now metal,

my body's returning to ticking toward irreversible

fortune, ever closer to its conclusion: I'll not live

to see forty. I'll die having known you intimately

though we never held hands, never alone together

burned in the dark of the movie house, Liz Taylor

and Monty Clift, her dignity and his brokenness,

brilliantly manifest in their one-in-the-same face.