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Sitting in
Margo’s garden reading
Philippe Ariès’
The Hour of our Death
Every visit I take it
from the bookcase
where it lies on its side with leaves inside
pressed between the cover and the frontispiece
leaves as brown and dry
as old bones
and sharp with the spite of death. I turn
the familiar pages and read the headings:
The Tame
Death, The Death of the Self
and if all history were portending
to a revision, deeper than deeds.
The Age of the
Beautiful Death,complete
acceptance or evasion, like two continents
in opposite hemispheres. Here, the Catacombs
of the Capuchin Convent,
Palermo: the odd choir
that has just shuffled in to fill the stalls
and here, in domestic Montepelier, Vermont
the funerary scupture of
Little Margaret, white
and pure. How could those skulls, if Margaret dug
undo her marzipan purity? Look, she might
say, running with one as
a vessel. What use
can we put this to? What use is death?
And our attitudes to it, do they
alter, in any respect,
the angel, or just
the way we look at him? Those often-
elevated floor slabs of churches
hiding corruption in a
blaze of lead and glass
or the quiet New England
burial ground
of graves like gentle
sheep, cropping together
in a meadow that seems
more eternal
than their eliding
inscriptions. The Dead Body.
The Visit to the
Cemetery. I close
my eyes
then open them to look up
at the sky
then the treetops, the
climbing sweet peas
the pond with lilies, the
cat’s grave
commemorated by a little
stone wall
and a fresh tussi-mussi
picked that day.
Between swooning and
fright
between the heartsick
knight and the hospice
between the neurological
bright light
I close the book I love
like a tablet.
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