(Memento mori.)
1.
Yes, Death is on the look,
and you'll know him by the crine in your spine,
the late blossom of the nose and earlobes.
The ends of your limbs stiffen and curl.
You're tonguing oblivion along the missing keys
in the hush of the gums of your last set of teeth.
And, having been beaten back by gravity
for so long, your bones are as stems,
sunken low, each of them in turn,
and your walk -- it breaks into a losing tug.
It ain't nothing but the shaking of the sheets.
No high mass for no holy ghost;
this is a rap -- it's growing old in me.
It ain't nothing by the shaking of the sheets,
which ain't nothing but the netting of sleep.
"This illusion is grim."/"Dissolution is grim."
2.
O silent bed I"m singing of,
stilled amid "the steel deputies of breathing,'
blooming its bodies a rinsed mortal blue
beneath a hospital television beaming,
and between them theme songs keening,
its grave laughter ringing;
"Gotta find myself a resting place,'
it's meaning.
On the bleached canvas of the passing face
slackens the labors of its last birth.
The sheet's seam soon shoring at thte forehead,
much as the frost conceals the brush whose color it snuffs.
Cousin to dust, having some to the cease,
your career of breath is finished thus.
3.
You'll know her by her arrow eyes
and voice of trembling clay;
otherwise she's lit bone-bright
through the black smoke of x-rays.
But you'll know her foremost by the drought in your throat,
its moaning-blowing muscles dreaming up
the mouth's final oval,
and the fact of your owning exhaling
from the objects gathered about you.
Aunt Sebastiana, a sister to the bleached stripper specter,
"like a spindle-legged spider, the skeleton strides."
Madame Lamort on a mare de noir:
Kellog, Brown & Root vivandiere.
It ain't nothing but the shedding of the sheets.
No high mass for no holy ghost:
this is a rap -- it's grown old in me.
And only through the blind and singing belief
in the blood's silent circuit does it toll for me.