Grey Rose

I.

Certain repetitions are unavoidable. They can be excised, but they arise.

And so it comes to this moment, that a woman is dying.

She has a name, for a name is given even unto a horse

or a slave or a kitten.

We will call her "Grey Rose."

She was born.

Now on this her bed of death, she coughs. She coughs.

It is said that at the moment of death, that the most pure light

floods into consciousness like lava on a barren mountainside,

moves across the sky like a bolt of lightning that sets trees ablaze.

It is said that we see all the most beautiful moments of our lives

before we depart.

II.

Grey Rose was wincing on her knees

and her eyes were closed tightly,

her head inclined to the left.

The man standing above her was violent and her lover,

her love. In his right hand was a stainless steel folding spade.

Black paint was on it, to one degree or another.

He struck her just above her right ear and the steel sheared

and she fell and she shook twice there on the floor.

She tried to rise. Her hands scrabbled on the wet floor.

She fell again. The blood from her head flowed down the heartwood

of the pines. He stepped over her and opened the refrigerator. He grabbed

two glass bottles of beer with his right hand.

Later she would remember reading something about head wounds.

Something about fistfights or flashlights. Her blood was in her mouth

and the spade had been left on the ground and where it had tasted her skull

it had once only been the color of silver but then shared space with red.

She laughed til it turned to a cough. She had recalled an ancient truism

first said by a marauding Goth to a priest of the Roman tradition:

-Father, how does one wash blood from gold taken in holy conquest?

-My Son, I do not know of a way.

-Father, your ignorance is of no great importance. Gold does not bear stains.

III.

It was that particular pine heartwood floor that she saw most, in her final moments.

There were other unpleasant things, and they should perhaps not be downplayed.

-The first marriage to the violent man,

how she had sought his hand again

twenty years after her first pain and divorce,

and because of this, tasted her life on pine

while the folding shovel sat quietly

-Children she loved the way that peasant women love the loaves

that are beaten before the baking.

Her grandchildren who had mothers just the same

-The hazy way that her head felt like a sunset in a modern age,

after coal had had its way

IV.

The slight realization that property is owned occurs. The children arrive.

Her house is owned, and in her name. After her passing, it cannot be the same.

Some few thousand dollars exist in one or more savings accounts, no doubt,

even if not remembered.

Her grandson has been hurt very badly by many people

and he has hands like gnarled iron and he has never cried and will not cry

when Grey Rose breathes her last. If he thinks on this,

he will suppose that he demonstrated bravery, or enlightenment, or death.

V.

The inhuman scream from the brutally tortured is in fact a reiteration of what it means

to be alive. In the moment of descent the purity of the future becomes clear.

If flames surround our feet and roast our life away, we deign to call them gods.

The knife that kills a careless tourist in a darkened alley becomes the kiss

of the Madonna. So many, so many in the trenches, and all of them with prayers.

Oh, the consolation of irony! They are faced with infinity,

with the closing of eyelids, the solace of coffin or urn or saltwatered grave.

They cry for God with swords carving out their abdomens,

with bullet holes in their lungs, with cancer at their bones or pancreas.

In the very last moments, they are all shown the most gruesome memories

of life. The unspeakable abuse of adults to children, of men upon women,

of fire on every living thing that creeps or runs or flies or digs beneath the ground,

all the most clarified evils, every man or woman sees these things before their death;

they compare these things to the future, the nonexistence that is the melting of a thread,

and they say of them-

"God, my god" or "mother, mother, my mother" or "Oh, my, how beautiful."