39 Nekroun: beatae memoriae

Shrill awakening cries issue forth unbidden from silent vibrating flesh.
Twisted chords vocalizing desire replete with life’s joy and anguish
in an unknown language, though one sens en matière, familiar and compelling.
Your words from my throat, sweet and savory on my tongue, like cream,
sharp on my teeth like torn flesh, soft on my lips like wild
strawberry in July, familiar, over ripe, pungent in the moist heat.
Thoughts of a single purpose animate my limbs sonambulate, as these words
of another speak to me, speak through me to utter a call for my own ears
to hear that I might know directions and expectations to bring me to you,
to bring you across to me; bain sidhe. The lady of surcease,
merciful handmaid of oblivion, sacred of persephone,
devote of kali, harrowing acolyte of the black mary.

This night my daemon finds you in a small room off the chapel,
brow wet, lips dry, chest shallow, weary of laboring for withered flesh
and exhausted soul emptied of fond reflections; memories lost as
wires and tubes snaked away last vestiges of humanity,
as time forgets youth, dignity and all desires but one.
I come to you, lover, wife, friend, teacher, poet,
seeing all this, as your voice speaks within me.
All that is lost will find a home in my temple archive soul.

I travel for a few days; taxi, train, metro. You called me far.
The Paris suburb, so different from your younger days is full
of familiar sounds and smells to someone from the south,
and I feel at home, as I walk in the twilight, tracing in my mind
the path stolen from your memories, to the hospital chapel gardens.
In the garden, deep in the dusk, I see a sister who has heard the call
arriving in case I do not, hoping, from her eyes to see me, if I do.

Silently our hands clasp and we kiss cheeks, no word on nights like this
for greetings, only for farewells; we say nothing, as finger to lips
I gesture for my sister to wait, or join me as she may wish.
As I ignore her for now, there will be time later to aquaint–
though we are sisters by calling only we have never met.
She stands wide and solid, dark skin and shining black hair
Blue Nile. Eretrian-Italian perhaps. War-child mother perhaps.
But my mind is elsewhere, on the voice in my head and a path
way unnoticed… when death walks by all minds shudder
and turn to anything for distraction.

The nurses know us and some even look up as we pass, and I smile.
No one can ever remember the face of we sisters passing. Handy.
Hand in hand we trace the path in my head, following now a single scent
that calls to me amon all others in the night. And there you finally are
at the end of the small ward, each bed veiled. Each occupant awaiting
her own visitor. In time. Each in time. We are ignored as we should be.
The curtains parting to reveal your sleeping form, and a man asleep
in the chair bedside. His hand in yours. My sister’s eyes meet mine
and we watch you two. Almost identical with age and proximity.
Not sibblings, I see young lovers in my mind. I see war and distance
and reunion. Above all, I see love. And we both smile for love.

Tinged with a blush of shame and polite regrets, I am here to break a bond
of many decades. Pax vobiscum. A kiss on withered sleeping lips.
A sharp intake of breath, and a sigh as I bring your last breath
unto me, stealing your spark of life for me to help me set you free.

38 Nekroun

Not just a job, a career.
A calling et raison d’etre.
An expression of zanshin
and esprit de corps.
For now and forever…
fin de temps.

I want you to want me.
I need you to need me.

That’s the way it works,
the cheap trick, and why
it works, as a calling.
I’m on a call, each day
and every night, 24/7 365
with time off for Lent
and good digestion.

Nex quondam.
Nex futurus.

“What do you say when death comes calling?”

“Wrong number!”

Death never comes of her own volition,
she comes when she is called; supplicant,
appreciative, to do as she was trained;
to carry you across to the other side,
bringing peace and surcease, and
take her token fee.

and wait in satiated slumber for the next assignment.
This thankless, lonely job, when observed from a distance:
a terror, a horror, an excrescence, turning your bowels to water
in dread anticipation and expectation of a visitation.

This little job of mine.
Everything’s going to be just fine.

Oops, crossed signals. Missed calls, and wrong numbers;
hazards of the job. Apologies and quick retreats,
all that can be offered, but I’ll be back…
when the time is right.
[Nekroun – v. to make dead; Nex is I hope a noun meaning death]

37 My love is the thought of a slow peaceful demise.

The violent crash of error and rash acts,
the endless interventions of uniformed professionals
of terminal disease, each has its attraction,
but for others–televised and mediated.

But for me, last moments are a worship
of life, in its last  moments.  When the hope
of respite are beyond recent memory
and the release to come is uncluttered and unfrantic.

A surcease of worldly intervention and care
in the watchful arms of death, fragrant and welcoming
in that timeless moment stretching infinitely between
two lost horizons of memory and oblivion.

34/35/36: Winter Tan

I

Voices spill out from the cafe, while I warm my soul in the winter sun,
wrapped up against the sharp mistral, craving the windy silence,
to the warm noisy within. The social mantle is off my shoulders today
and I endure the glances reserved for the recluse as patrons enter.
It is time to head home, south, to shed my hat, scarf and gloves
and resurface as myself, among familiar friends and villages.

To watch the tourists on the beaches, as naked as August,
as if by force of desire the sun will do more than melt snow on the hills.

There is something revenant about the winter tan,
charlotte rampling pale skin on northern flesh
recently liberated from a necrotic freeze; almost
translucent blue, almost still frozen in appearance.
Awkward movements, stick-like ambling unsure
whether life still heats within–still quick and green
under the epidermis of dry dead skin.
Returning from the grave north to the mercurial south,
in relative terms, in the hope of recitation.

II

No sign of the fluid casual step, the self-assured saunter,
of bright skirts under peasant blouses, crisp white skirts
over pressed pants and deck shoes of the cognizant.
They live, in warm summer nights, reclining lizardly pool-side,
on private beaches, or boat decks in languid shoals and colonies
under dangerously blue skies. Unlike these refugees of the winter tan,
huddling like lost souls at Lethe, magic-carpet beach towels sparsely set,
alone on the shores of the sea that only a dawn were dusted with fine snow.
The bravely desperate make tentative ablutions to the saline goddess–
walrus flounderings in the cold surf–as if to prove, in the hopes that
something miraculous will revive the sleepy seaside of their souls.

III

I watch all this from the mind’s eye of my displaced vantage,
Villeneuve d’Avignon. Yesterday it was Vaison la Romaine.
Tomorrow perhaps Arles, as I slowly wend my way back home,
retracing the steps of the conquerors. Home to feed
with satiating wonder, on the slow warming blood
of the displaced on the hard stony beaches of Nice:
death in Villefranche, as I watch for someone
who has not come to pretend to live
but to bask in the last sunny days, and die.
Somewhere on a hazy cape or under a keel
in a deserted marina when we meet.

Yes, it is time to go home. Time to die.
Time to live again, on the past
and the ashen half-blush nape
of someone never going home.

.