"Tarot Card of the Dreaming Man, Face Down"
Click here to listen to Mark Conway read this poem.
Then it was gone, the beatitude of your body, ********* while the rest lay ****** specifically there, black, black, blue, heavy as a dead dog, the back of your legs ********* looking plastic, looking extra, trailing *** behind the rest of you like a mooch, like a goddamn moron and you barely there, **** already caravaggioing your way through the light ********* and dark, mouthing the prime numbers ** of eternity …
We gave you days to continue dying
**and you did
**after you were dead. We
needed time: poor relations
to arrive; to decide upon
the precise symbolism
of the flowers; to complete
the box; nail it into
position; to divest the body
of its slime; to call
your name three times;
to call you three times;
to call you by name three times.
And at first.
You wouldn't go.
***You own this body
***somehow
***thriving within the caucus
***of microscopic insects and dazzled
***acids there to burn you down to ashes
***you over there, you
in your over-there work-body
of the soul, your hooded
spirit released and humming
*********like it's crazy in the light.
Where you are, slipping
**through the monstrous
inner membrane of the world,
you see how it works.
I, like a mooch, like a goddamn moron, live.
We waited for you. Two or three days.
Then an old man came and prayed.
Mark Conway works at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota.
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