Poet in the Corpse Garden

photo by Floris van Breugel.

Tropical birds screech from behind a dense tree canopy while I sit alone on the veranda in a wicker love seat. A ceiling fan stirs the humid, fragrant air. Squirrels scavenge in the thicket, sorting leaves, patting down nuts with a dusting of dirt. I sip brandy and work on the day’s poem while my love withers away in a brass bed upstairs. The hospice nurse sits on a dining room chair beside the bed, leg crossed over knee and a murder mystery novel pried open in a single hand. Her leg bounces, like the heartbeat in the bed beside her, irregular and fading. Don’t stop.

Her parents are coming tomorrow to talk me out of custody of our little girl. I think I will give her up. Not because she reminds me of her mother, which she doesn’t, but because I want to increase my pain to match my wife’s. I want to go through what she’s going through, so that she is not alone. Or is it so that I am not alone? Of the two of us, I was always the coward. Like now, like my poems, like this fear of the tropical birds and squirrels scuttling in the brush.

Branches form bridges in the blue sky, and snifters full of brandy hang from the trees in the hidden grove. I scatter her ashes in air, gentle dance of dust through rays of sunlight. Death is all around; I count corpses down in the copse, along with all of my broken art strewn about. Sculptures with broken limbs. Portraits rendered and torn. Her dust has not even settled over the thicket before sprites emerge from the green curtain, supple limbs and untouched faces of all the pretty girls I knew before. May I come inside, I ask? Just a moment, you say? Yes, a moment is all it takes, and a moment is all we have left.