Mortician

Mortician

Who’s sorry for our trouble?

Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves

In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?

Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

                                    Seamus Heaney 

                                    “After a Killing

It felt like a defilement

(and I’ve been at this a long time—)

these girls and boys laid out naked,

each leech stunned, still

sucking in the stainless steel drainpan.

The old lieutenant in me wanted

to stab each sleek freak

with a scalpel, it was as though

I’d come up again to that Belgian

village and there they all were

women and girls gurgling

in flies, their eyes already some crow’s

prize—Who, Jesus who

splayed and invaded them that way?

Maybe that’s how vows are truly made:

a near-man picks up his first girl

and she’s got her cheek on his lapel

and he forgives her

the stink, the bulge under

her hair, forgives her all the way

down the road to the inn, enemy

sleeping it off, she a long thin stocking,

a thin abandoned thing of skin limping

out of his wool heart.  And today these: boys,

girls, straight as a dormitory beds. 

The water saved them that; and the blood-

suckers smooch and juice

while I comb back the hair

and keep them sleeping, sleeping, always

sleeping like sweet those mothers

and daughters in Belgium, ravished and axed

before we arrived so all we could do

was wash and dress them

out, clean their cheeks with my drinking water,

and dig—narrow but deep—

and sing, I can’t remember what now

covering them, the way these children are…

funny how I think of those girls

and these leeches, who are the last

to know their warm blood: nothing

intelligent—nothing tender, nothing but pure

drive, blind and alive.