Death

Even the graveyards grow lonely,
stones and bones that fail to sing,
the hearts that will not pound.
It is night, night, night,
so black we can not see,
as though we are blind inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of our flesh and into a spirit.

Still they lie,
feet made of earthenware,
death runs in the marrow,
a runner with no marathon,
bolting out from a starting pistol, from casket tombs,
moldy dampness covers her face and she spirit dances through the cemetery.

Sometimes I am blind
but I see coffins taking off,
embarking with the dead, with women that have dead hands,
with sculptors who are ashen white,
and pensive young girls surrounded by yellow hues,
caskets flying up the vertical runway, cleared for take off,
the runway of eternity,
cruising the lane with jets filled out by the sound of turbines,
filled by the roaring afterburn.

Death departs to that whir
like robes with no choir,
roaring down the runway, a plane with no pilot, no
co-pilot or steward,
comes and screaming with no throat, with no lungs, with no
vocal chords.
Nevertheless it can be heard
and its robe makes a whispering sound, like a rocking limb.

I’m insecure, I perceive only a little, basically blind,
but it seems to me that death’s singing has the color of calendula,
soothing swollen earth and decorating deities,
the pallor of death is unseen,
and the look death gives has a yellow hue,
with the penetrating dampness of yellow bile
and the jaudiced color of embittered winter.