Michael Gessner

But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their only purpose was to grieve, & crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave. When lovers leave, they leave their kisses glistening on the gray slab, on impressions of lips themselves, a tissue of strangers’ cells the conservators cannot leave alone, & scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees by law, no one can deface this tomb, & still the images of lips remain, dark gray stains of animal fat imprisoned in limestone. Lips are pressed as high as lovers climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous headdress, on the carved trumpet of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight, that some farsighted lover tried to open with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty, while others kissed its sybaritic mouth to make a poem a prophecy. So here is love alive surviving the wreckage it survives, a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight to some other place, less aware, more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.

This is the poem of death. There is only one and no other. Every one is an occasion, one way or another, and the last poem is this poem of death. It is an occasion like no other. I will no longer lope after elegance, beauty’s body, or love’s wonder. I will be sorry for everything I was, and for everything I was not. I speak to you as if you were my brother. I will forgive everyone. Death will make this possible. There will be no other. Death was in the mind before thought or love, in ourselves, and in our lovers. The poem of death is speechless. A companion will appear again like another self, like your brother. Enough now, enough has been said. The spinning leaf will spin like no other.

Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel, or what life itself eventually reveals. No more studies of kindness or courtesy, nor grace or charity, all is needless now. All is needless now, sky, world, family grieving for their bundles of purity, now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets, or whatever attacks, and then retreats. Classrooms emptied of children’s things, paper and paste, and love’s imaginings, bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed with the unborn and the dead at rest, nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel or what life itself eventually reveals.

Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Complaining orderlies and rattling carts Among these in this place my father lay At the end of everything In the curved landscapes of white sheets Abandoned finally by parents, his son, The loyal company, old friends, his death A sign of other deaths too soon to come Unable to recall one life, his thoughts, Features, he lay unknown to himself, The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy In vellum corn and brassy orchards In an autumn that never was, the proud White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings From daily syringes of Cytosar Considered useless, still a requirement For state funding for a body described Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers Who came to raise the spirits of the dead With a music he never cared for turned Suddenly attractive, he found genius, Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor That shapes itself in the dry night air To make a thing then make it disappear He lay listening to the county fiddlers At the end of every purpose, act and form I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.