 If you can bear it so, be dead among the dead. The dead are occupied. - Rilke |
Corpus
After they washed my body
and threaded my arms through the sleeves
of a dress I’d bought in the thirties
in a Cuernavaca market, they looped a rosary
around my folded hands. A bloom
from the bougainvillea is tucked behind my ear.
I am dressed for church; I am beautiful
in death. Oh, the perfume of my hands
rises from me like prayer. I am gone, yet here
I lie waiting for the man
to come for me, to wrap and box me,
to burn what’s left. Unusable,
this brittle spine, these still feet.
Unusable, these folded hands,
hands that tended, arranged,
wiped clean floors cleaner still,
hands that chose the melon,
sliced and served it, threw out the rind—
the unusable rind. These hands loved work,
what will there be for me now?
Life was work; death should be no different.
Leslie McGrath
