Death Alone

There are lone cemeteries, tombs full of soundless bones, the heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel: like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul. There are corpses, clammy slabs for feet, there is death in the bones, like a pure sound, a bark without its dog, out of certain bells, certain tombs swelling in this humidity like lament or rain. I see, when alone at times, coffins under sail setting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids, bakers as white as angels, thoughtful girls married to notaries, coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead, the wine-dark river to its source, with their sails swollen with the sound of death, filled with the silent noise of death. Death is drawn to sound like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer, comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless, comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat. Nevertheless its footsteps sound and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree. I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see but it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets, violets well used to the earth, since the face of death is green, and the gaze of death green with the etched moisture of a violet's leaf and its grave colour of exasperated winter. But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom lapping the ground in search of the dead - death is in the broom, it is the tongue of death looking for the dead, the needle of death looking for the thread. Death lies in our beds: in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets, lives a full stretch and then suddenly blows, blows sound unknown filling out the sheets and there are beds sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.