Friday, March 16, 2012

The One-Way Ticket to Florida

Everyone loves death
they hunger as for nothing else
they leap into the night
and think of nothing other
than that syrup, that home of black,
the bitter tea no substitute,
the rose a foreign scent.

Why does feeling turn so quickly into pain
and thought to hopeless puzzlement?
Such suffering will end, we hope, or at least
an end will set us free without our having to let go.

A kinder sleep
without the undone crying
through knotted pasts in dreams.

At last unbroken stillness
and everything forgiven
and nothing to be scared of
is unveiled,
the final ice white lover
unwinds her lace, unspools her garter
and the thing we have been praying for
flows like endless stars.