The Color of Death

Death colors everything.

Earl grey spilled on the counter.

Weddings and birthdays.

Books, theatre, sports, and sex.

It suffuses life by its crooked edge,

shading it in with its chronic eclipse.

Death shows itself,

lithe and supple,

in its own indefinite figure,

so utterly familiar,

carried around in the whispering storehouses of our minds.

So utterly strange,

terrifying and revolting,

springing up suddenly in a frozen corpse at a funeral.

Death is anticipated in love.

“Till death do us part.”

It is the Nothing that makes the Something.

Death calls to us,

interrogating our potential,

prodding our finitude.

Death disregards fate and providence

and introduces us to accidents, nailing us to contingency.

Death interrupts us.

It shouts “Responsibility!” shaming us with its excess:

oil spills and rising sea levels,

shootings, bombings,

and sexual assault at the border.

Death is the floor

on which we

stand

sleep

eat

piss

kiss

trip

cut

caress

and sob

like infants.

Death is the bed of forests,

and food for beasts.

It’s the vitality of survival,

what gives the courage to be.

Death is passage to God

and the silence of the world.

Death is divine forsakenness

and the forgetfulness of the sea.

Death is mine and it is yours.

Death sobs

and it sounds like

singing.