The Very Long Life

(For Doshia Watkins,1909-2011) There was more in you than in me. There was the outer core and the inner storm, the staged whispers and curtain calls which go awry. There was the energy I gave. There was patience, like black birds watching from a wire, watching the altruism of modest men. There was the newspaper on the clapboard floor to catch the grits and the cast-off waste, the internal trash, the wayward words, the parts of the mind that have malfunctioned or died. There was the table with a glass of water which you needed to drink, avoiding dehydration; there was the act of love and the acts of pain. So, then, in that cathedral of flesh, the dream is, to make the bones, tolerable bones, to make them squeak less, like autumn owls, or like death's own dreary pain, as he descends. Where your eyes, little weak black balls, had settled on the room, where you cried out that you didn't want to be scrubbed so hard, that was your existence, a depth beyond the room, the nightlight, and the sick bed. It became Pascal's room: the wager within each finger, the talk that corrupts the light, the acceptance of fragility, the mumbled verses before cars have moved, yet not the anomaly it seems to be, from the side of the slow mouth to the tongue, where tales from the thirties stalk the new, prime image, the last of tired smiles. Southern moon. Southern sun. No more of them to be conceived. Yet, the eyes said what they desired: speaking of the night and the time of night, and what erupts, and what died off, the old Raleigh clichés, the hospitality of a tempered race. It was at the sink; it was on the door mat, at the balmy door, to be opened, when a century spins. You lived: a weed which thrives, dusk not knowing it is falling, not seeing the creeping seasons, the bark of related trees. The table is everything. The lamp determined how you moved around, if clumsily or with an erstwhile grace. This was the beginning of trepidation, the blasphemy of predictions, walls painted in a yellow hemlock, to be tasted with tea.