poetry – Page 12 – PSYCHOPOMP.COM

the ending, by Gwynne Garfinkle

I picture you at your typewriterimpossibly young in the blackand white world of the 1950swriting I Bury the Livingyears […]

I It goes up, forever. Changes the sky’s color.A howl in the sere grass. A death, root-sunken,resonates down into

Everything washes away,Red running down to silver against zinc.The tools are set aside. The voices stay,Locked in drawers at the

An enterprising chooser of the slainThought to select him: not Death,As he had feared, but surely Her bondsmanTherefore to stay

When I died I rose to meet myself, not quite as shadowed leaves touch leaves that fall on water, meeting

The Fates persist in fractal layers,the tapestry they weave spreads fingers, grips skeinsthe work itself a weaver,that winds yet another

Turn back from these precipices,where the wind strikes its wind harp with jagged fingers of rock and bone.Sure, you died, but

The amount of architecture requiredto ferry the dead must be momentous: train tracks of finely wrought silver runacross the shores

It comes in waves, in subsurface currents. Some believe a soul can leave the body days before death and hover

1. I’ve keened, cracked dryas riverbeds before rain, heart pressedto cactus thorns till flowers bloomed brightas the dancer’s painted hands,