While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your
teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They are moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not
reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would
go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding
judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on
the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this
forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air-conditioned room full of food and
chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female
God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole
in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying
on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate
elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an
underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and
hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of a furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three
headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn
Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light
rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like
you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
This complete Poem Text contains 353 words. This
study guide contains 7,797 words (approx. 26 pages at 300
words per page).
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