After Life
After Life
Barley and mint: death and rebirth, female
Scent and spirit to wash the dead and cleanse
The sanctuaries of the heart--wash me with hyssop,
Burn congealed blood of frankincense and myrrh,
And let me breathe in those blue threads of smoke,
And cross the sharp sand, into the gray rock,
Under mushroom skeins and woven roots,
Down through the watery entrails of deep mountains.
In the runoff from the two springs, not far
From a momentary confluence near tree line,
I look into the water, and among
The shallow ripples a bright, serpentine
Tiger’s eye peers out from the turbid flow,
Or is it that I stare into its green iris?
Like icy, silver streams of tears, the waters
Bubble from deep in time and memory,
So that in the green tiger’s eye I see
The ruins of childhood, youth, manhood and age
Broken like the dead in the hall of Scopas.
When I was young a troll would visit me.
She wore a cypress veil. It draped her head,
Which was her entire body: unencumbered
By either arms or legs, she rested by
My bed, wrapped in the casket of her veil.
I only saw her in the violet darkness,
Where her gray skin glowed with pallid light,
And chiseled teeth shone through her bloodstained lips.
She loved me and taught me about the night,
And the dark, solemn power of solitude.
She was only with me for a short while,
But I think, though we’ll not meet, that she
Is somewhere in these nether rocks and roots
Which house the dust of all that ever was,
The nameless nothingness that I must be.
Under crystalline networks of snowflakes
Which shroud dark, frozen seeds and even reach
Through the rock orifice of this dark passage,
Below the mingled dust of generations
Of broken petioles and scattered leaves,
Friends, lovers, scars of heart and mind, withdraw
Into fragile wisps of broken recollection.
They are here, all around me, faint impressions
In the long track of my solitary journey.
Some I knew, others I’d rather not have,
But all are here, lingering in the prints
Of recollection and forgetfulness,
Reviving well-worn traces of what might
Have been, of what had never been,
Vestiges of memory and imagination,
Mirages in the ambivalence of twilight.