© Alan Reade, 1994 and 2020
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Death Walks
Dear Richard: Sometimes I do manage to convince myself that I'm safe up here in my apartment. Other times I feel as though I'm looking down at the living dead through my window. What do you think of that, Richard? Do the dead have a particular "look" to them? Or can you even see "back there?" "Up there?" Wherever?
I guess the difference between the living and the dead is the ultimate "us" and "them." But I think, in a way, that we all want to be dead. Not unliving, really--just blameless, incapable of wickedness, forever lovable and vulnerable, as only the dead can be.
But that's something that bothers me. Why, Richard, after a year, am I starting to remember only the good things about you? Not your humanness, but your more saintly qualities? When I remember your face, the kaposi's sarcoma lesions have faded somewhat. And I don't think so much now about how you resisted writing a will, leaving your friends' lives in disarray. Oh, Richard, I don't want to canonize you. But my memory seems to have its own agenda.
I read somewhere that time heals all wounds, but that history picks at the wound, keeping it raw and bleeding. My memory has more to do with time, then, wrapping death in kaleidoscope colors, candy-coating the subjects. Until I can't be sure of what was really there and what has been added...with time.
Laocoön
Lazarus
On the first day, you were like Lazarus
Because you rose again.
This time, it was to get the pitcher of water
That lay beside your bed.
Your lips hung like fat laundry
On tired lines. This is how you were
On the first day.
On the second day,
I talked to the doctor
About your "condition."
His eyes extended back into his head
Like the long, blank tubes hooked up to you.
Breathe deep, breathe easy, I said to you.
Life is but a dream, even if it makes us cry.
The doctor tells me nothing
On the second day.
On the third day,
You could sit up in your bed
And talk, though incoherently.
Your wrists were pencils wrapped in Kleenex.
This is how we wove our way
On the third day.
On the fourth day,
You looked away
When I told you that you would die soon.
Doctor said--
Nurse said--
Somebody, I don't know who said--
(All I know
Is that this life,
Despite the unclean things
That enter and exit our bodies,
Is a wonder.)
You closed your eyes
And slept a while
On the fourth day.
On the fifth day,
You were shaking so badly,
No one could help you
No one could hold you
No one could hold you down.
It was like an earthquake.
I wondered where the fault was,
And whose it was,
On the fifth day.
By the sixth day,
The flowers by your bed
Brought out a light in your eyes:
The light of seeing
A way out.
A way in.
Incoherent
Stumblings on the
Sabbath day.
I knew to be true;
I knew you were free, could see;
Flowering tree;
God knows what you mean to me--
But when it's time,
It's time.
There is no Lazarus here; you will not rise again.
So I watched you,
While you watched me, with your new eyes,
In the darkness,
With the flickering TV on your bluish face,
And your breathing like a child's,
And your breaking voice;
And you sang:
Row, row, row your boat...
Gently down the stream...
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...