Sketches of a Dead Man Breakfasting with God -- Star Black

IX

Such release: paginal peace,
a blink of sun, its jaunty palaver of moist mirth
that fans, like Pan, jocular deities with tunes
into the reveries of mosquitos and men—
resumes its stolid ephemera,
memos of mania ere the tomb,
the wet world's carved scars, its henna-toned tattoos.
Skywise, pshaws of near-noon
blanch the hostas' spawning latitudes
with determined bees.
Dragonflies await the distant delays
of lawn weddings, their white amoeba-like flux.
Separation, the conundrum of love,
is nipped, by sacraments, in the bud,
as ceremonies ingest the nothingness of death,
one by one. The great comeuppance
of belief that keeps all ships
from every reef,
under draconian insect wings
above the clipped-green sloping gardens,
reseams the fray of longing with the promise of steadfast
Penelope,
or of the stature of olivine in a rain-sloshed tree,
its rattle of cyclic monarchs
and bark-bashed beaked taps.
My love once glimpsed the weary, wetted wing
before he glimpsed everything.
They will review him.
They will discuss each shadowed gesture.