Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Nine Winter 2005 |
|
burial at sea Joseph Kerschbaum She asked me, before she lost her tongue, to bury her at sea. She knew this was reserved for sailors slain or lost on foreign shores, but she said that is what we are regardless if neither of us have ever laid eyes on an ocean. It was hard to tell what were secrets rising to the surface like caskets in a flooded graveyard, and what was drug-induced delirium but I am certain she was sincere. Before her mouth became a broken window, she asked me to finish any endings that keep washing up on the same shore every morning. She made many requests when she was still able to speak. She said what I was not ready to hear. I could not listen enough. Neither of us are talking now. One of us is drowning. Her body is a loose bag of bones when I lift it from the bed. I carry her down the stairs her arms sprawled in a dead-mans float. When I lay her down on hard ground she is a shattered raft. She slips under the surface. This is as close to the sea as we are going to get. I am beside her, both of us freezing one heart slowing, the other racing. My hand on her chest, she fades as we disappear. She is not here to witness her passing. She does not feel this. She is not freezing I tell myself. I told her I could not harm her, so I will let the world find her throat. I bury her under the sea falling from the sky. Both of us lost. We sink under the rising drifts. I am drowning. Then I remember I can walk on water. |