If survive means “to outlive,”
Katherine Parr met the criteria—she lived
another year after Henry.

But, having come to fame
in this manner, her death naturally
became unimportant. For instance,

tourists poking around the eighteenth-century
ruins of Sudley Castle discovered
her tomb, and thereafter she was accorded

no rest. The sixth time they exhumed her,
the tenant who occupied the land
held a party. They took out her body

and danced with it. They tugged off her head.
Her arms. I daresay in time she must have
gotten used to it—watching golden

bars of light gliding obliquely
across broken masonry, listening to voices
never her own. Or the farmer’s rabbits

scratching in corners, as if foretelling
a time when ancient rivers change course,
and all memory slips into sweet undertow.