In Memoriam: To Those Who Die in a Distant Land (2011)

To Cecilia

In Memoriam: To Those Who Die in a Distant Land (2011)

Late spring news of the first death: an email
written by a mourning spouse.
Mad (mentally ill and vehement)
she died broken, riddled with cancer
like her father decades before.
Insane, her psychiatrist mother did nothing.
She believed in the elusive and the impossible,
like violets sprouting from the wall,
floor lights on her shoulders.
Colors poured from her brain, but the crop withered with neglect.

Prompted by news of the first, I indulged and clicked,
the modern search for a past.
A second death. A blog. A eulogy.
She, a stone pure and hard.
Softness petrified, bent and sharp, refracted in light.
Oh, how she shimmered and clawed.
Dry wit, flirtatious eyes, beautiful slender fingers that moved with shadow puppet skill.
Her ruthlessness came and swiftly departed, and always, a strange repentance.
Yet these moments gallop by: hikes and poetry on a grassy hill,
a brave drive through a deluge,
laughing in the cold air of Venice,
clapping to flamenco through the night.
California, long ago.

Celestial creatures make difficult friends, bewitching
and paralyzing mortals, they squeeze and suffocate in the name of love,
tidy collapsed and strangled bodies strewn at their feet twice a day.
Later, such women sip fruit tea and lacquer their nails.
They wield a blunt lance. It punctures steel,
drives a black hole in a helmet of reason.
Such bellicose belles howl and never surrender.
Parentless, childless, friendless, middle-aged
at their final bedside: a cousin, a partner.
Like moons in a darkened sky, some court clouds that obscure,
cultivate people like constellations of light,
or crawl into caves hell-bent on anonymity and adulation.
Cliffside acrobats, they push you from behind, watch you fall,
clean grime with sanitized wipes.
Lead the way!
They teach the pointlessness of it all,
(LINE BREAK, NO STANZA BREAK)
the futility of dignity,
revive and resuscitate through mirrors and art,
the delicacies of cannibalism.

These deaths from a dimension I no longer open.
I have left the continent and memories are reduced to scents of chance,
Footprints of sand disappear and distance means tidal forgetting.
Before lives were compressed to bytes,
stored and exchanged from wire to screen
we had to let them go.
In modern purgatory: we search, boot up, click to find.
Memory and past endlessly surface.
What is death and mourning? An accident of geography, biological misfortune, conversations between those who knew you,
a shift in money and belongings, a knowledge of suffering abated.
I too wait and avoid.
In middle age, I no longer live by impulse
am hostage to yesterday’s diaphanous grip,
to burning sticks and twigs, pyres that call to the sky,
thick sweet incense, a black silk dress stored in mothballs.

Before I tuck into permanent night
I take a direct flight home.
Quiet, I break the sound barrier, move past gravity’s pull,
retrieve the lost and abandoned
float in stardust higher and farther.
A woman of no god and no faith
I mourn through my pen.
My cells collapse, gingerly step in lines around my eyes.
I exchange perceptions for light
abandoned by a twist of love
by the memory of nothing
by the memory of more.