It smells of ouzo drowsily sipped
death does
smells of a gypsy’s black curls
smells of honey-hued candle
guttering
in the dark eye sockets
of a marble polished skull.
The fissured ivory, once dovetailed
on the riven cranium
in an earthquake need undoing again.
It smells of honey-hued candle: death does,
guttering in sockets of grime.
There came a gale curling round and round
and it swallowed the ashes in itself.
The key turns rusty
in the door of eternity.
What sound does death make
on oral roofs … in nasal caverns?
Bell muffled into clapper
starched in the tongue’s shroud
phantom thunder
the mind’s knot thundered like straw.
The cypress tree dangles nebulae,
the imbibed stars are phosphorous
eye of the dead.
The honey-sweet hurt of a mother’s breast
bit by baby gums
like the tentacles of death’s octopus.
The body is cast fish-naked
in a sweat of icy beads
like a bridegroom between sheets.
In the amplitude of a sagging chord
a keynote is born,
the flight from time begins.