Service for Twelve: Writing Their Eulogy

Or this: 

Never having felt to the roots

of this hair, he scrapes and pulls and chafes

each follicle that falls…  he holds it in

the light of the dim moonmoat,

a jaw on the white

white page of the still to write

eulogy.  The paper’s a cavern yawn of a fox jaw

he’d seen once as a boy, and the nib’s

her black meat jowl on white teeth.  And soon,

because eulogies like these are nothing less
than going out blind in blizzards alone, 
and bunking down, he hallucinates
a bright wet red against the paper snow.

And when the weather clears: the sprung closed

trap he’d put his weight into a day, maybe two,

before, to set…

(and the still blaze of that precious coat,

and the two ungloved girls, their hands hidden 
but he imagines the pimply skin
anyway)

And this too, going into, going through:

It was the cold the stiff cold that scorched him—

Maybe he’d expected warm, maybe,

a broth or tea, but when all the hes or shes..., he didn’t stay

in the make-shift morgue to see
those dozen driftlogs in summerwinter water, crushed

under the thick cove, like ice thinning at his feet, his wits,

his diaphragm a ceaseless hiccup.

To lead to:

Until the thaw.  Until some mercy caressed his mouth

the way sprung springs sigh when pulled back

by practiced hands.  Only when they don’t,

all to once like thought, they are that very same caught log

pulled into and under the tide like all the rest—

But not like that. It was never like that—:

sermon words—eulogy words—

they were, at first, the fox’s wet

black nose sensing the air and coming up

to that moss covered bait-plate

and leaning in and sniffing and leaning in
and tilting her head while opening her mouth
to get at the meat at an angle

and snap!

That fast.  What’s sprung is sprung.
The marvelous gateway's a blur
now, a shade of Eurdice's winding
sheet dragging on the underground.  In his dream
she's petting the fox:

            Pure grace, she is a grin inside all that golden grass

            he wanted to see when he was nine, when her tail,

            swallowed by the hillside, was just that, not the snow,

            not the black-toothed goon closed on her nose.  No.

            Instead it’s her mouth, her tongue.  Her rooted teeth still
            needed, still necessary, still a row of teeth letting in,
            letting out, letting go, letting go, but no words, no hell 
            no, not a yip or a word.  Yet.