of her death at 6:02AM EDT
in a cold-linen hospital bed, fourth floor,
lights traversing a sole aperture of declination;
I imagined her spirit on a morning ferry
crossing thick currents in liquid luster
where the cresting sun poured out
reflection after reflection,
scattered rays birthed and rejoined
as islands of flowing fire,
cast in abundance toward a land
supine in its day-to-day.
Doctors of a steady bearing warred,
minds ablaze by blade and vow,
while the prosaic calmly tossed pills
behind a mask of plain and distilled humanity;
I felt small in my chest
as she was languid in sterile hands,
when they folded her clothed and naked body,
pulling and bending as the clock slowed,
then stretching her anew
like black robes of the bronze age
preparing their offering
to a burning salt lake.
She once told me she would paint a new earth,
dip brushes wildly, soak canvas at the ecliptic
because gravity left long ago;
she said she could love in totality,
melt the old worlds, distantly resplendent
as the chaos of an O-type star appears
like serene sparkle light years away;
she showed mathematically and
through collimation, a life after death,
and diminished the parallax of our perception
when we watched the way orbed fire
sank gently into the transpose.
At dawn she slept in the truest way,
a tallowed hull, gliding on a glass ocean
blooming with citrine at the horizon,
while Mnemosyne and Ourania composed notes rising
from the tide-pulled seas, upward and onward,
her spirit destined to pass the skies
and the dark expanses and through
star after star after star,
beyond dimensional boundaries
where all is coded and quantified and known,
and where the eternal light from her body
returned peacefully to the source.
