Day After Day of the Dead
by Nathaniel Mackey
“While we’re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’d someday
be…
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’d admit…
No longer wanting to know
what soul was, happy to
see
shadow, know touch…
Happy to have sun at our
backs, way led by shadow,
happy to have bodies, block
light…
Afternoon sun lighting leaf,
glint of glass, no matter what,
about to be out of body it
seemed…
Soon to be shadowless we thought,
said we thought, not to be offguard,
caught out. Gray morning we
meant
to be done with, requiem so
sweet we forgot what it lamented,
teeth
turning to sugar, we
grinned
•
Day after day of the dead we were
desperate. Dark what the night
before we saw lit, bones we’d
eventually be… At day’s end a
new
tally but there it was, barely
begun,
rock the clock tower let go of,
iridescent headstone, moment’s
rebuff… Soul, we saw, said we
saw,
invisible imprint. No one wanted to
know
what soul was… Day after day of
the dead we were deaf, numb to
what the night before we said moved
us,
fey light’s coded locale… I fell away,
we momentarily gone, deaf but to
brass’s obsequy, low brass’s
croon begun. I fell away, not fast,
floated,
momentary mention an accord
with the wind, day after day of the dead
the same as day before day of
the dead… “No surprise,” I fell away
muttering, knew no one would
hear,
not even
me
•
We wore capes under which we
were in sweaters out at the elbow.
Arms on the table, we chewed our
spoons…
Mouthing the blues, moaned an
abstract truth, kept eating. The
dead’s morning-after buffet
someone said it was. Feast of
the
unfed said someone else… What
were we doing there the exegete
kept asking, adamant, uninvited,
morose…
Elbows in the air like wings, we
kept eating, rolled our eyes,
kept
shoveling it in… Day after day
of the dead we were them. We
ate inexhaustibly, ate what wasn’t
there,
dead no longer dying of thirst,
hung over, turned our noses up
to
what
was
________________
It was me, we were it, insensate,
sugared sweat what what we drank
tasted like. Even so, the tips of
our
tongues tasted nothing, we sipped
without wincing… We ate cakes,
we
ate fingernail soup, a new kind of
gazpacho, no one willing to say
what soul was… Knucklebone
soufflé we ate, we ate gristle, eyes
we
took from flies flying backward
a kind of caviar, none of us wanting
to say
what soul
was
