When he climbed upon the bed, sated, summertime;
memories of his unusually long life
didn’t render him shade —
didn’t console him with that dream of a bicycle.
Instead, from the crypt of his old sorrows appeared
his dead sisters
hanging upside down from the roof,
wiggling their smokey limbs, whispering in the air,
as if they couldn’t wait to anoint him.
Appropriate not to regret then,
he thought:
this, going from nowhere to nowhere
but scampering from one emergency to another,
mingling with blood, bone, and vagaries of light.
Why worry about the seizure of self
as one dies: the I is an aloof property
of the body at best.
Till the old sisters vanish in the waft of the sky.
With this hope, he awoke never to see
this orphaned dream again.
Image: The Poor Poet (1839), Carl Spitzweg, Oil on canvas, 36.2 x 44.6 cm (14.2 x 17.5 in), Neue Pinakothek, Munich
