from Lives of the Dead: An Epic: Chapter Four

With the flesh gone the heart’s desire dried.

Life, dreams are of flesh. Now

flesh was gone. Who’s next in line? The bone.

Without tears and sorrow and without waving a hanky

bones took their leave of the dead man, from the one body

and left, each bone on its solitary journey.

As cries lose touch with the crier’s mouth,

lose touch with the pain that gave them birth,

and set sail in the air, playful gusts of sound,

so the bones quit the body of the dead man

to roll an independent roll through the ground.

And the dead man continually shrank, and continually shriveled,

bit by bit of him was lost.

The leg detached from the body and went its way

and became a separate entity.

The hands left one another and became estranged,

what are you to me, we were sisters,

we clapped together, now we’re grown old,

two gray spinsters, hard bitten,

falling apart is something we can manage to do alone.

Indeed, the mesh of bone is tough, you will not melt it

with longings and memories; another world, hard and strange

hides beneath our flesh; bone does not love

does not remember, not women

and not the light of the sun, with a rubbing sound

like the sound of porcelain scratching,

it crumbles and with the knock of breaking bones

the living form recedes and is forgotten.

Goodbye legs, goodbye hands, goodbye hip sockets and spare ribs,

goodbye spine and collar bone, goodbye all of you

we knew together a kind of rickety ensemble good for taking pains

that bore on it with a sigh a sackful of hanks of meat

for Christmas; Christmas is past, the meat consumed

it’s time to part even from the bone that bears,

so now is our parting season, the tree’s leaves

fall in autumn, so our body loses its leaves.

And of the dead man just a little ball of skull is left,

and in it four holes packed and bunged with earth

and since the flesh of lips is all eaten and his teeth bared to the end,

the shameful smile of the dead man is lost and he’s mixed with the earth,

and from between bared jaws, as from a broken urn, a last grin blossoms

for is it not a horrified grin, in the skull of death.

The dead man lay in his grave’s darkness and smiled his horrified grin

that all his forefathers grinned at him (and he joined in

watching the crowd of the dead, and waits expectantly

for the funny spectacle of his son’s death, his fall into the grave

and his ridiculous desire to be taken to his father’s bosom),

and they all lay, a field strewn with skulls,

each man a skull deaf and dumb

fastened into the earth and gazing up into the night sky.

And opposite the night sky checkered with stars beaming—

winking at the magnificence of the universe and its secret,

there is a firmament below, rolling with rollicking skulls—

winking at the horrors of death and its terrors.

And firmament looks at firmament, as in a funhouse mirror.

And a man all bent, that goes home alone at night,

seeking a fitting mirror to the burden of his life,

won’t raise his head on high and won’t wonder at the universe’s mysteries

only he’ll gaze below, for there the sky suits him

and it has no secret, only a piercing pain

and it has no riddle, only a laughable solution,

and there is no dome of blue, only a peel of mockery

where score upon score of horrified grins

shine gleaming from the lower firmament,

like stains of fat from a butcher’s filthy apron.

Indeed, it seems shame has no end,

as if death put paid to everything

and only left the insult that wriggles.

And as it grows darker, and there was a dark there

inside of darkness, and as the dead man dies further

and gets lesser, fainter, and crumbles

so the shame magnifies.

And as one who shuts his eyes and squints in the darkness with great effort

suddenly sees colorful stains of light,

so, in the darkness of his adopted death, the dead man sees

the piercing shards of laughter, its cutting leaps,

colorful mockery, unexpected, sharp, a startling panoply of shades—

so hurtful, that there is nothing like it in the embraces of joy

and all the wreath of these colors was not created

except to decorate the pain of our shame.

And at the end of many years, when even the skull is fallen away

and become flakes of dust, the wind

with a whistle of contempt will cast them out

to every part, and still will be borne with them the sound

of the cry of the dead man,

a moan so great as to never pass:

Hey, you up there, I was here too!

Home goes the tired ass,