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In Lieu Of A Funeral

in memoriam: Steve Forster

Death has nothing to do with skulls or bones
seeping into the earth like widows
horded behind windows and doors,
nothing to do with the crumbling aqueducts of arches and vertebrae
that used to carry serpent fire and a thread of water,
and the gentler lightning of the little god
who was rooted in our flesh like an apprentice in a studio
learning to paint the world through our eyes, not
the gaping sockets, the oracular shrines of calcium
the blind worms probe like calendars and soft pencils
for signs of our former lucidity, the charred wizards
etched on our cave-womb walls, not
the rotten jaws and teeth we primed like leg-hold traps
and baited with roses of meat and fragrant blood
to tear and grind our daily bread
from the inquisitions of raffled animals we demonically possessed
until, unmuscled by time, unstrung like an old guitar
they lie forever open in amazement,
unhinged in the earth like ghastly lockets fallen from the foodchain.
Nor in the crumbling molars and brave patinas of our gravestones,
or the dozen words cut like valleys
through granite and marble by the unrequited eons of our tears
to say in the native ink of a waterproof language
we were here awhile among the flowers
for reasons only the rain can guess, not in the braille and signage
of these sad tokens can you refine the facets
of the black jewel turning in the light
like the lens of an indelible eclipse. There is no abacus
of days and nights, no boundary stone or compass
with the eye of a needle, no astrolabe
or ocean with coasts, no delinquency of clockable stars
to surmise the expanse of a journey narrowed to a point
like the contracting pupil of an undiscovered eye
breaching the watchfires of stranded immigrants
burning their coffins like books and lifeboats.
The human body is a bag of water with nine holes in it
and we’re all leaking out, bankrupt clepshydrae,
trying to make installments on a sea
that soon forecloses on our petty accounts, but death
is not a debt we owe to anything, not a fee for the ferryman
or a pig for the ogre at the mouth of a passage
that would otherwise gulp us down, nor
as the dark priests habitually aver
is it the craze of some ancestral miscreance
fathered on our cradles by a fall. As every executioner knows
better than those who employ the killing frost,
or the prisoner bound and hooded like a shrub
against the coming cold, death is not a punishment,
nor for the citizen of the new country
unfurling like a flag of blood in the bathtub, an escape.
The vagrant heart no more
we miss the flowering, the fire-paths, the urgent fathoms of the rose,
the maladjusted poppy of the famous apron, the introverted socks
that cried all night in their finishing school, the common sacristies
of chaste luggage, the occult cupboards of bookish bread
tutoring the plates in the Latin roots of things, the ruined eyelashes
of evangelizing nails spurning the cold bouquets
of broken-hearted hammers, we miss the aging sugar-sack
that charmed the lemons and the onions with spoon-shaped valentines,
and the moon, the streetlamp, the white peony in the watering-can,
the long hand-shakes of disinherited saws
lamenting the strict custards of their arboreal grandfathers
cunning as flies and fishing tackle. But who, among thorns,
afflicted by albino scorpions, the fetal keys of random miscarriages
that shocked the dirty sheets one night with red carnations
and fed a hundred unused baby-names
like leftovers to a famished drawer,
or the treacherous rashs of amorous adjacencies,
or the bitter histories of neglected vinegars that couldn’t sing
assassinating the voices of the mysterious wines who could, who
purposeless and bored among the abandoned ropes and ladders
of the pharoahnic garage, the thick skins of mummified paints,
or wedged like an ax with a broken handle in the poached stumps
of endangered chopping blocks, misses these, misses
the long, slow catastrophes that weep like years of glass?
The sunglass general is not sanctioned by his victory,
nor the cataract of the fool deferred by his defect.
Death eats the curse as well as the blessing, the climax
in the used condom beside the bed, the star in the well, the twilight
of the kiss, as well as the lightning strike that ashed
the wayward witching wand of the groping ant
like the spider-harp in a lightbulb, it eats oblivion, disaster, disease,
it drinks to the lees the faithless acids that green the copper trees,
it eats the ancient embryos of the souvenir dreams
pressed between the lean pages of florid shale, it eats the useless gesture
and the prowling submarines of sin piked under the polar caps
of aging oxygen, decrepitude, debility,
and the brooding marrows of the dusk. Fatter than a weekend newspaper
death eats but does not grow, a surfeit of deprivation, a feast
of the crucial blue salts it sits below like the sea
dethroned by the waste of its corpulent table with nothing to add of its own,
in the lowest place of all, receiving all, facelessly, eye to eye,
the colossal horses groaning like captive temples
in the ruins of their bones, and the dim star of the little red money-spider
cannibalized on its wedding night by its bridal companion,
and the unstopped flutes of the children, some no bigger
than their arms, who died before the rain could tune their fingers
to the sadder clefs of the candle-snuffing columbine,
and the wise in their tents on the moon, nomads
of a borrowed light, deceiving oceans, and the shy ones, the tender ones
afraid of heights, lost ear-rings in lachrymose places sworn to silence,
who curled into themselves like prophylactic fiddleheads, nuns
of the night that sighed in their wombs, and the proud, self-made ladders
who transcended themselves rung by rung to climb
all the way up to the sky like boys in the show-off trees
ashamed of their roots, and the deserted and the lonely in the last acts
of bad apartments with broken intercoms, wardens
of their own solitude, gnawing on the heads
of the plaster cherubs and plastic grapes that garnish the shoddy restaurants.
Without taste, without discrimination, without appetite,
because death is always full, as the eye
that takes in a million stars is always full,
as life that is its own food is always full, not
leaner by a butterfly for all that it consumes, nor ever
sated by the butcheries that tuck and tailor their meats to its waistline,
death does not malign the living or cover the dead with calumny,
no more than indivisible space, neither vast nor miniscule
mars the lifelines of the brilliant rivers that traverse it, or a billion galaxies
that fly off in all directions like fireflies from the cradle of its palm
are obstructed in their courses. Where does my fist go
when I unlock my fingers, or my lap when I stand
or the dawn when the day is far along? And by noon
when the sun is at zenith, and the clock is a widow walk
on a lonely tower encompassing the sea, are the shadows unmanned
by the synchronicity? And where does the wind go
or the wave or the flame or the person
when the fountain-mouths are still, or the silence when I say your name?
Death is not a collusion of time to undo our sandy fame
in the divine ignorance of an unspeakable wasteland.
Like a tree that isn’t elated when the birds and leaves return in the spring
and isn’t downcast when they part again in the fall;
as it was before we swam in the shining
and as it is now that we’ve come ashore,
death is a gesture that any child could understand.
Death is an open hand.

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