While you are preparing for sleep,
brushing your teeth or
rippling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day
are setting out on their journey.
They're 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 into a funnel of flashing colors,
into a zone of light,
white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge,
who sits with a golden ladder on one side,
a coal shoe 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,
wily 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.
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.
Few 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 the 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.
And
some just smile
forever on.