Thursday, April 5, 2018

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.


.

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