|
ALLAN
PETERSON
Disposing of the Body
For the last time, lose this and you lose everything,
perspicuity and elegance, memory, immoderate desires,
the wink of Maya in the Chinese jades
we are loathe to acknowledge.
In the most ghastly example, the lingering flayed man
of Vesalius comes quietly apart for us
in a silent considerate dance on a hill above Padua
saying there is nothing, nothing from the tombs.
Anything left there is still the same old news from the living,
doubled ears of rice in nephrite, stone tears
furrowed like shoestring rills. No reappearing body, no bacillus
wanting so much to take some jewelry, a few dusty jars of food.
There are only reminders how tightening silence’s drawstring bag
is a strange procedure, pressing down at the wrists,
impeding the heartbeat to feel it. 
return to top
|
