Death

In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smoothgranite.

Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

i was left out
i was chosen second & then left out
i was left
handed i was left
to fend for myself i
was the second in
command the second
in line i came
without direction

*
i want the
milk i want my
first pick i want
choice & all its implications there was a

*
residue of
scar
between us it chafed
when we rubbed our
chests together

*
hello, brother, hello?
hello in there, brother, can you
hear me? it's a long
tunnel to the grave speak

Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’ s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’ s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.

At night—the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source—he thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.

Long scree of pill bottles
spilling over the tipped brim
of the wicker basket, fifty or more,
a hundred,

your name on every one and under
your name the brusque rune of instructions —
which ones to take, how many, and often,
on what days,

I walked from my house down Coolidge Street last night
And air, beginning movement in the trees,
Shook down a hushing from the branches.
On either side of me the houses
Like solid shadow, blocks of silence
In the violet light, so dim without dimming.
And I saw you, Saul, my old friend, waiting
For me at the corner where our two streets met.

I summon up Panofskv from his bed
Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,
Suffers the stone’ s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies
Of simple visual ease,
Usurps the place of the complexities
Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.
The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, 
carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is 
almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon — the hands are without shelter ­ ­ ­ ­ — as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.