Nature Morte

People and things crowd in
 [ ... ]

Should I say that you’re dead?
You touched so brief a fragment
of time. There’s much that’s sad in
the joke God played.
I scarcely comprehend
the words “you’ve lived”; the date of
your birth and when you faded
in my cupped hand
are one, and not two dates.
Thus calculated,
your term is, simply stated,
less than a day.
Who was the jeweler,
who from our world extracted
your miniature –
a world where madness brings
us low, and lower,
where we are things, while you are
the thought of things?

Should I say that, somehow,
you lack all being?
What, then, are my hands feeling
that’s so like you?
Such colors can’t be drown
from nonexistence.
Tell me, at whose insistence
were yours laid on?

There are, on your small wings,
black spots and splashes –
like eyes, birds, girls, eyelashes.
But of what things
are you the airy norm?
What bits of faces,
what broken times?
What places shine
through your form?
As for your nature mortes;

Yet you’re akin
to nothingness –
like it, you’re wholly empty.
And if, in your life’s venture,
no-thing takes flesh,
that flesh will die.
Yet while you live you offer
a frail and shifting buffer,
dividing it from me.

Mary now speaks to Christ
 [ ... ]