Not the struggle before, not the years and pains and rare joys, the sorrows and sufferings—none of that interminable interminable is happily brief. Just the moment itself, a snapped fingers for those lucky/unlucky to be eyes wide open as it comes: the white ceiling above the hospital bed, the half-loop track for the curtain to ring; the scant flicker in the track’s aluminum of the machines all around you, their murmuring green, yellow, red. Ah, like constellations, you think, and (from within your failing corpus) you ignore the bodies and hands and the (life-full) breathing of those gathered around and you raise your eyes and try to tease out, in the lights, a pattern.
You are a sailor on a ship, gazing into the night’s sky, searching for meaning.
You are a child, terrified to sleep at night, seeing faces on the wall—meaning.
You are a reader, turning a book’s pages, searching for…a glimmer? clarity? answers? distraction?
And then it comes it comes the sky it flickers is gone the captain reveals a hidden pistol slips a shot into your heart, and there it goes the blood galloping away from you, away, pouring through your fingers, and the little heads above dangle leer and laugh and the dying woman shoves you into the street before a runaway horse and you lower your head and kneel penitent on the tracks before the oncoming train;
the sky flickers; the sky flickers; the sky flickers.
The sky is gone.
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