33. GENTLE GRAVE

Now that I’ve landed in my gentle grave—
this dusty terminal of fallout particles,
clothed contagious, wrinkled like a mummy
in aurora-florals (I’m still breathing)—
I demand that you applaud for me
to the ends of the earth in animated revelry!

I’m the Diphylleia grayi
that you’ve placed into my blind-pulsing casket.
(I’m still breathing through this mask,
shifting like shadow-spasms.)
Soon! you will see the icy black soil
glow brightly upwards out of every schism
bursting out of the fractured nimbus-bonnet
of the earth’s temple, beaming forth
crystallized illuminations—spectators
whistling through the silver air…

And on some glorious night
as you’re arm-in-arm with your newest love
underneath a starry sky, I will come
from forlorn exile to unravel around you
as an apparition of smoky plumes
with a great uproar like angelic multitudes
cheering-on my visible-absence
in tethered plethoras; a ringleader
of hypostatic disunions, a tribunal of ogres agape,
tusks of wild boars; my eyes aflame
as if impregnated by sun-beams,
returning effluvious with the might of typhoons
from the Celestial Atlas, crushing
the constellation’s memory of us
(a heaving bosom of folklore running amok
like a creeping hum) to HAUNT YOU wholly,
to HAUNT YOU slowly, dissecting rawest,
gagging your freshest love’s holy blooming infancy
the way that Hercules strangled serpents in his cradle.

How then O Great Silencer, my Stoic Amphitrite,
will my life be valued as I rush like bulls on parade
towards your invisible arms?