from The Dade County Book of the Dead (1995)
Eye sockets, caves, shadows in the skull beneath the glass,
like Lascaux pigment or smoke-stained walls.
Home is where the bones are.
Whir. An eye glides out on its telescopic stalk
and winks at death; the little moment sliced,
air bright with each hatchet flash,
the cracked kernel of some private grief, filed.
Caught forever in the amber of their own gone time.
Extinct, all their rituals nullified:
embalmed cats and tiny scarabs
ripped out of each sarcophagus like matchbox toys
for the pleasure of the casually gaudy hordes.
Disinterred, the bodies of defeated tribes
are dragged around the city walls.
Here we have the stolen masonry of Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre.
We gather, diamond-sighted, into a hum of flies.
Motor drives. The sheets unwind. We cannot catch
the stink of nothing bandaged in formaldehyde.
Fogged by breath, ghosted by our faces on the glass,
the palimpsest of tissue, the bone codex, blunts our eyes.
The blind worm crooks its finger through the braille.
We rip more vision from its packaging, check sell-by dates,
entomb hoped-for light in protective dark.
Elsewhere in this city, psychopaths kill for company;
strange men in houses dusty with sloughed skin,
anticipating the dust of their own flesh, naked,
talced like cadavers before the mirror's long rake.
In the freezer, feet grow toenails of ice;
a head simmers on the stove, flesh peels away,
rendered down to the human glue
that couldn't keep it all from falling apart,
as it always does. It falls apart on you.