[SLOWLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
While we're alive, we kept repeating, tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths, bone dry.
Skeletons, we'd someday be.
Panicky masks we wore for effect, more than effect.
More real than we'd admit.
No longer wanting to know what soul was, happy to see
shadow, no touch.
Happy to have sun at our backs, way led by shadow.
Happy to have bodies block light.
Afternoon sun lighting leaf, glint of glass, no matter what.
About to be out of body, it seemed.
Soon to be shadowless, we thought, said we thought.
Not to be off-guard, caught out.
Great morning, we meant to be done with.
Requiem so sweet, we forgot what it lamented.
Teeth turning to sugar, we grinned.
[SLOWLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
Day after day of the dead, we were desperate.
Dark with the night before, we saw lit.
Bones, we'd eventually be.
At day's end, a new tally.
But there it was, barely begun.
Rock the clock tower, let go of.
Iridescent headstone, moments rebuff.
Soul, we saw, said we saw.
Invisible imprint.
No one wanted to know what soul was.
Day after day of the dead, we were death.
Numb to what the night before we saw moved us.
Fey light's coded locale.
I fell away, we momentarily gone.
Deaf but to brass's obsequy.
Low brasses crooned, begun.
I fell away, not fast.
Floated.
Momentary mentioned in accord with the wind.
Day after day of the dead, the same as day before day
of the dead.
No surprise, I fell away, muttering.
Knew no one would hear, not even me.
[SLOWLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
We wore capes, under which we were in sweaters,
out at the elbow.
Arms on the table, we chewed our spoons.
Mouthing the blues, moaned an abstract truth.
Kept eating.
The dead's morning-after buffet, someone said it was.
Feast of the unfed, said someone else.
[PLAYING PIANO CHORD]
What were we doing there, the exige kept asking.
Adamant, uninvited, morose.
[SLOWLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
Elbows in the air like wings, we kept eating.
Rolled our eyes, kept shoveling it in.
[PLAYING PIANO CHORD]
Day after day of the dead, we were them.
We ate inexhaustibly, ate what wasn't there.
[QUICKLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
Dead no longer dying of thirst, hung over.
Turned our noses up to what was.
[QUICKLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
It was me.
We were it, in sensate.
Sugared sweat, what we drank tasted like.
Even so, the tips of our tongues tasted nothing.
We sipped without wincing.
[SLOWLY PLAYING PIANO NOTES]
We ate cakes.
We ate fingernail soup, a new kind of gazpacho,
no one willing to say what soul was.
Knuckle-bone souffle, we ate.
We ate gristle.
Eyes we took from flies, flying backward, a kind of caviar.
None of us wanted to say what soul was.