IN LIEU OF A FUNERAL

IN LIEU OF A FUNERAL

in memoriam: Steve Forster

Death has nothing to do with skulls or bones

seeping into the earth like widows

horded behind windows and doors,

nothing to do with the crumbling aqueducts of arches and vertebrae

that used to carry serpent fire and a thread of water,

and the gentler lightning of the little god

who was rooted in our flesh like an apprentice in a studio

learning to paint the world through our eyes, not

the gaping sockets, the oracular shrines of calcium

the blind worms probe like calendars and soft pencils

for signs of our former lucidity, the charred wizards

etched on our cave-womb walls, not

the rotten jaws and teeth we primed like leg-hold traps

and baited with roses of meat and fragrant blood

to tear and grind our daily bread

from the inquisitions of raffled animals we demonically possessed

until, unmuscled by time, unstrung like an old guitar

they lie forever open in amazement,

unhinged in the earth like ghastly lockets fallen from the foodchain.

Nor in the crumbling molars and brave patinas of our gravestones,

or the dozen words cut like valleys

through granite and marble by the unrequited eons of our tears

to say in the native ink of a waterproof language

we were here awhile among the flowers

for reasons only the rain can guess, not in the braille and signage

of these sad tokens can you refine the facets

of the black jewel turning in the light

like the lens of an indelible eclipse. There is no abacus

of days and nights, no boundary stone or compass

with the eye of a needle, no astrolabe

or ocean with coasts, no delinquency of clockable stars

to surmise the expanse of a journey narrowed to a point

like the contracting pupil of an undiscovered eye

breaching the watchfires of stranded immigrants

burning their coffins like books and lifeboats.

The human body is a bag of water with nine holes in it

and we’re all leaking out, bankrupt clepshydrae,

trying to make installments on a sea

that soon forecloses on our petty accounts, but death

is not a debt we owe to anything, not a fee for the ferryman

or a pig for the ogre at the mouth of a passage

that would otherwise gulp us down, nor

as the dark priests habitually aver

is it the craze of some ancestral miscreance

fathered on our cradles by a fall. As every executioner knows

better than those who employ the killing frost,

or the prisoner bound and hooded like a shrub

against the coming cold, death is not a punishment,

nor for the citizen of the new country

unfurling like a flag of blood in the bathtub, an escape.

The vagrant heart no more

we miss the flowering, the fire-paths, the urgent fathoms of the rose,

the maladjusted poppy of the famous apron, the introverted socks

that cried all night in their finishing school, the common sacristies

of chaste luggage, the occult cupboards of bookish bread

tutoring the plates in the Latin roots of things, the ruined eyelashes

of evangelizing nails spurning the cold bouquets

of broken-hearted hammers, we miss the aging sugar-sack

that charmed the lemons and the onions with spoon-shaped valentines,

and the moon, the streetlamp, the white peony in the watering-can,

the long hand-shakes of disinherited saws

lamenting the strict custards of their arboreal grandfathers

cunning as flies and fishing tackle. But who, among thorns,

afflicted by albino scorpions, the fetal keys of random miscarriages

that shocked the dirty sheets one night with red carnations

and fed a hundred unused baby-names

like leftovers to a famished drawer,

or the treacherous rashs of amorous adjacencies,

or the bitter histories of neglected vinegars that couldn’t sing

assassinating the voices of the mysterious wines who could, who

purposeless and bored among the abandoned ropes and ladders

of the pharoahnic garage, the thick skins of mummified paints,

or wedged like an ax with a broken handle in the poached stumps

of endangered chopping blocks, misses these, misses

the long, slow catastrophes that weep like years of glass?

The sunglass general is not sanctioned by his victory,

nor the cataract of the fool deferred by his defect.

Death eats the curse as well as the blessing, the climax

in the used condom beside the bed, the star in the well, the twilight

of the kiss, as well as the lightning strike that ashed

the wayward witching wand of the groping ant

like the spider-harp in a lightbulb, it eats oblivion, disaster, disease,

it drinks to the lees the faithless acids that green the copper trees,

it eats the ancient embryos of the souvenir dreams

pressed between the lean pages of florid shale, it eats the useless gesture

and the prowling submarines of sin piked under the polar caps

of aging oxygen, decrepitude, debility,

and the brooding marrows of the dusk. Fatter than a weekend newspaper

death eats but does not grow, a surfeit of deprivation, a feast

of the crucial blue salts it sits below like the sea

dethroned by the waste of its corpulent table with nothing to add of its own,

in the lowest place of all, receiving all, facelessly, eye to eye,

the colossal horses groaning like captive temples

in the ruins of their bones, and the dim star of the little red money-spider

cannibalized on its wedding night by its bridal companion,

and the unstopped flutes of the children, some no bigger

than their arms, who died before the rain could tune their fingers

to the sadder clefs of the candle-snuffing columbine,

and the wise in their tents on the moon, nomads

of a borrowed light, deceiving oceans, and the shy ones, the tender ones

afraid of heights, lost ear-rings in lachrymose places sworn to silence,

who curled into themselves like prophylactic fiddleheads, nuns

of the night that sighed in their wombs, and the proud, self-made ladders

who transcended themselves rung by rung to climb

all the way up to the sky like boys in the show-off trees

ashamed of their roots, and the deserted and the lonely in the last acts

of bad apartments with broken intercoms, wardens

of their own solitude, gnawing on the heads

of the plaster cherubs and plastic grapes that garnish the shoddy restaurants.

Without taste, without discrimination, without appetite,

because death is always full, as the eye

that takes in a million stars is always full,

as life that is its own food is always full, not

leaner by a butterfly for all that it consumes, nor ever

sated by the butcheries that tuck and tailor their meats to its waistline,

death does not malign the living or cover the dead with calumny,

no more than indivisible space, neither vast nor miniscule

mars the lifelines of the brilliant rivers that traverse it, or a billion galaxies

that fly off in all directions like fireflies from the cradle of its palm

are obstructed in their courses. Where does my fist go

when I unlock my fingers, or my lap when I stand

or the dawn when the day is far along? And by noon

when the sun is at zenith, and the clock is a widow walk

on a lonely tower encompassing the sea, are the shadows unmanned

by the synchronicity? And where does the wind go

or the wave or the flame or the person

when the fountain-mouths are still, or the silence when I say your name?

Death is not a collusion of time to undo our sandy fame

in the divine ignorance of an unspeakable wasteland.

Like a tree that isn’t elated when the birds and leaves return in the spring

and isn’t downcast when they part again in the fall;

as it was before we swam in the shining

and as it is now that we’ve come ashore,

death is a gesture that any child could understand.

Death is an open hand.

PATRICK WHITE