On Learning She was Dead

She felt all floaty. Was she dead? She

thought she might be since the thought was

unencumbered by the smallest sense of dread.

Dead indeed she was! She was the silence

in her head now, not the buzz. She knew

.

the freedom of alignment. She’d succeeded 

at one task, the first of three, of what somehow

she knew to be her posthumous assignment:

to know that what she’d done was die.

Second task was to remember how and why.

.

She recollected easily who’d caused her swift

vertiginous decline – who’d pressed her 

in a pretense of seduction to take innumerable

sips of Spanish rosé wine immediately after

which came her collapse: a trembling seizure,

.

then immovably supine. She knew now calmly,

clearly, with a sort of offhand leisure she’d been

murdered: massive dose of strychnine. That she

knew who killed her seemed so unimportant now,

brainless filler in a tedious tv show where

you don’t much care to know the busybody

business of the plot whose gray particulars in

any case you just forgot. What reason was there

to remember, with everything dismembered?

What from nothing was there to beget?

.

On cue, two aides-de-camp companionably

joined her to enjoin her to abandon her

abandonment – apply herself to learn and carry

out her third, last task (“you’ll bask in it, we bet!”).

She did, and that was it. Dissolve in it, forget.


.