by Jamie Parsley
OPHANIM
Such viciousness!
coming up from the undercroft.
It wafts from there,
dank and foul
like incense
unsanctified and coarse.
It’s violence!
It’s anger and chaos!
How did I fall so far?
How has it come to this?
How did I descend
even lower than
an undercroft?
And yet, here I am.
I can do nothing else
but accept it
and listen to it
as it rises into our faces
and fills the room
with its knife cuts.
All I can do is stand here,
dumb and blank-eyed,
and bleed.
KEYWAY
The notches
fit together
even despite
the sludge
and decades of
build-up.
Everything, after all,
somehow
eventually
fits together.
And we too
our scored limbs
slip easily into place,
working together
to fit our uneven pieces
back together again
as best we can.
RUDE!
How rude! to step forward,
to gallop into the leeway
and move forward.
And yet I do.
I lean toward what awaits me
in the open area—
a necklace of orchids,
a cloud-banked sunset,
a glimpse of some elusive heaven
that cannot possibly be real.
And for a moment,
I am not broken by stars
and flinty anguish.
For a moment, I have escaped
the grave
and walk around
just like everyone else
in the light of the day
as though it were as normal
as anything.
For a moment, I realize,
this is life! life!
For one righteous moment,
I find myself—
against my nature—
moving from one thing
into something even more.
DISINTERMENT
The long, narrow blade—
rusty and caked with dried earth—
slices deep into the loam. I use it to reveal…
what? Some thing? But I’m not in this surreal
moment
certain what that thing might be
or what it is for certain that I’m searching for.
A discoloration of earth? Still discernable bone
flakes—
pristine as pearls—
even after all these years. It’s been fourteen years
since this earth closed over that poured out chalk.
In fourteen years the earth takes care of what it has been given.
It takes it and makes it its own.
Transubstantiation!—
flesh of its flesh, bone of its bone. As it should.
After layer upon layer, there is no discoloration,
no bone fragments of course. This is what happens—
disintegration. Or rather, integration.
I have known it too well.
I too have been dis-integrated, bit by bit until there is nothing left.
I too have dissolved back into the elements,
as easily as a wound closes and leaves not even the trace of a scar.
It’s like the empty tomb.
There is nothing at all to show anyone was here in the first place,
anyone who lived a long, full life full of joy and bitterness.
It’s now what it is meant to be—
mineral of mineral, substance of substance.
This science of interment.
This natural afterlife.
As it always was
even now must it be.
RRCC 