Funny How A Crisis Is Born

After what seems like months of nothing—
peace—
it enters the room like the eyeless head of a snail.
Something that has traveled a long way to reach you
and make its little torrential introduction
as we stand terror stricken upon the furniture.

Funny how the crisis moves within the house.
Almost invisible, but with the odor of buried, long
forgotten earth. Insisting to be remembered.
Opens its body and light comes out. Light of a different
fiction. Unfamiliar. Deranged. Where once
there was a wall, a stool, a refrigerator…a person.

Now there is this odd family of muted things, closely resembling
something good but changed in the most unsettling way.

Wedding Day

It is the second time you’ve brought
me here.

This one story
church among the grove of deathly lemon trees.

Yes, it is my wedding day, and I am happy;

You are there in a bed. I see your feet first,
one shorter and slightly swollen than the other, no top sheet, all over you
a yellowness.

You

who sent a letter with just the inky imprint
of your tongue upon it

So what was I supposed to think?

How did they manage this? Revive you? Dig you up?

You breathe and move your head, eyes almost open

Hoping
you are not dead.

How long am I expected to consol you in your agony?

I swallow the little white tablet of fear
that you included in the package and go ahead, turn to my
new wife

and ask if she’d like to pick some;
pick some lemons from the trees on the hill.

What A Fly Might Tell Me About Years To Come

It walks and beats itself against the window.
This is in the midst of a
heat wave in New England, late July.
Soon, banished by
itself to one corner into which those
eight to twelve lifeless eyes stare alone,
the microscopic dreamland.
His body a kite in the infinitesimal knife of a world;
this world with both greater, and more miniscule beasts.
The hair upon my arms crawls disapprovingly at its plight
as the hobos sing songs in the rain.
I touch my hands together and watch the water on the glass.
It cools them, cools the glass.
And I imagine them each
as hands of an older gentleman, and how an old man like that
might touch these same old hands together
while watching a pelican roost on a mossy pillar, while
the sea pitches, and the cool, white object of his
wife rests in her grave.
The fly flips. Six legs writhing. Convulses
directly off of my table; and my bones move
underneath my skin like secrets in the complexities of a lie.
And I think of them—

jaws, fingers, teeth.
All disconnected from their larger pieces, from the greater outline.
And how long that will be.

How much time will pass
between my death and my deterioration, when my thoughts have
dissolved entirely.
How faint will my soul be?
How distant the residues of this life upon
their yellowed surfaces.
How inconsequential my yearning
to keep it.
When that dirt, that time, that matter
has come apart. Slowly spread.

And settled.