The analogy of
animal death we take for metaphor.
If aging is a disease & all are afflicted by it,
then let us find a cure, & soon,
for time should not feel lighter than blood,
than breath.
When the cure comes
for those who can afford it,
how will we practice for it?
"Suddenly" will be the norm, termination by appointment only,
new euphemisms welcomed into common parlance,
& the rare ingenious exit merely tolerated.
How deep seem those
long ago gulps,
to have drunk all that youth without tasting it.
Through a stealth of sense,
practice rounds of reading glasses, hearing loss, joint pain
are involuntary joyrides through death’s moonscape.
We begin immersed
in shroud of fluid,
even before birth drink of it steadily.
The empty promises -- to remember everything,
to resist forever’s lie, life’s brim-bulging fullness,
shameless flood plain settlements,
this unexamined thirst -- are wholly by design.
Nightmares,
tributary divinations, soon come.
Hated children with their smooth skin, midget smiles & leering trust,
dates scribbled in the corner of marbled-cover themebook pages,
names written in cursive on photographs.
Mother. . . Second cousin . . . Disconsolate lover (Oh yes, dead now) . . .
Resemble one another, appointments that bled one into the next.
Are we less
hurried, knowing that memory will incompletely fail?
Expect the broadband of tangerine yogurt she scooped out,
perfumed red hair lifted your way in the doorway’s easy breeze,
the fluorescent apricot sunset softening her shoulders
-- to be bitten into, tasted, swallowed,
then oozed away through drying, cracked senses?
Cannibal years, how
they roamed continents to enjoy my flesh.
Up from tropical young Africa, through Europe’s adolescent strife,
over austere England’s mountains green,
only to abandon as inedible what remains in this Arctic isle,
leave me to weakened struggle with the taffy of remembered pleasure.
Yet how omniscient
not to have foretold
this appointed afterimage rising up before me,
this floating refrain of you
in your distant opulence,
& the immanent, incurable, cold, cold?
(c) dark 1995