The Last Word

for Lem As if your half-witted tongue Spoke with an eloquence Death bestows, I heard your voice Muffled through the dark Layers of cemetery loam: “They found me black-suited In the shuttered half-dark, my eyes Dug like claws into the clouds’ Soft feather-turnings. What kept me Separate the broiling sun Of intellect now shone on fiercely: In the sheep-pens stinking Of dung and lanolin, I buried my face in the ewe’s Swollen side and listened For the lamb the way The night sky listens To the synapse-fire Of meteors, the fibrillating Heartbeat of the stars. I heard the cells crackle Into being, the embryonic Brain begin to burn: Hunger. Thirst. Beneath my ear My own disastrous birthing, The umbilicus strangling Like a whip around my neck, Shoved through the momentary Breach memory tore open— Dying revealed to me my birth, How half my brain went dark, One side of a universe Pinched out like a candle: Just smart enough to sense My difference, yet not know why— Even my death was the thrust Of a bewildering punchline: On Thanksgiving Morning mouthwatering Pain shoved like a spit From my bowels to my brain.”