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,
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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