O Silent Bed

(Memento mori.)

1
Yes, Death is on the look
And you'll know him by the crine in your spine
The late blossom of the nose and earlobes
The ends of your limbs stiffen and curl
You're tonguing oblivion along the missing keys
In the hush of the gums of your last set of teeth
And, having been beaten back by gravity
For so long, your bones are as stems
Sunken low, each of them in turn
And your walk -- it breaks into a losing tug

It ain't nothing but the shaking of the sheets

No high mass for no holy ghost;
This is a rap -- it's growing old in me

It ain't nothing by the shaking of the sheets
Which ain't nothing but the netting of sleep

"This illusion is grim."/"Dissolution is grim."

2
O silent bed I"m singing of
Stilled amid "the steel deputies of breathing,'
Blooming its bodies a rinsed mortal blue
Beneath a hospital television beaming
And between them theme songs keening
Its grave laughter ringing;
"Gotta find myself a resting place,'
It's meaning

On the bleached canvas of the passing face
Slackens the labors of its last birth

The sheet's seam soon shoring at thte forehead
Much as the frost conceals the brush whose color it snuffs

Cousin to dust, having some to the cease
Your career of breath is finished thus

3
You'll know her by her arrow eyes
And voice of trembling clay;
Otherwise she's lit bone-bright
Through the black smoke of x-rays

But you'll know her foremost by the drought in your throat
Its moaning-blowing muscles dreaming up
The mouth's final oval
And the fact of your owning exhaling
From the objects gathered about you

Aunt Sebastiana, a sister to the bleached stripper specter
"like a spindle-legged spider, the skeleton strides."
Madame Lamort on a mare de noir:
Kellog, Brown & Root vivandiere

It ain't nothing but the shedding of the sheets

No high mass for no holy ghost:
This is a rap -- it's grown old in me
And only through the blind and singing belief
In the blood's silent circuit does it toll for me