Death’s Birthday Gift to Me

I’ve been collaborating now for hours

with Death. I don’t mean metaphorically,

nor do I mean I’m trying to evoke the morning

I walked in to find my mother dead, her eyes

wide with unseeing and her mouth and chest

all clotted with the morphined jam I’d given

her some time before which as her final reflex

she’d spat up and which now stained her

night gown like fake cinematic blood,

nor do I mean when I ran to my brother’s

room when Jack his partner screamed his

name to call him back because the racking

rasp and rattle had just ceased inside his throat,

nor do I mean when I walked in to see my

father’s corpse’s eyebrows had been trimmed:

who’d done this misbegotten thing? My father’s

eyebrows were like Samson’s hair and it was

very very wrong to see they weren’t there,

no, it’s more to do with what these rhymes have

just come back to celebrate: Death and I have

been collaborating on a portrait of its face

which only could arrive to take its place upon

a piece of paper from what I’ve been able

to derive from all the live genetic bits I have

from Kettelhacks and Blakes and Hilgens, Fords

and Stonehouses and all the other surnames

which suggest the sources of whatever I may be,

the DNA affording my ability to draw Death’s eyes,

which enterprise I think I’ve managed to complete

quite well. In fact I can’t stop looking at these

mild open eyes: they are so interested; they

cast a quiet spell, as if they’ve lent me some

essential history. Death’s birthday gift to me.

.