Death Becomes Awe Forevermore

Ceaselessly we row into the past, into the dank cellars of death whilst the red and rose youth wonder what becomes of the lightning splitting of trees or the mountain’s awestruck surfaces. Never the grieving mothers and the forgiving of slights, of the loss of absolutes and everything the pale cast of waking light has made more beautiful after the fade into night. And more crickets composing more disquieting death knells. So ceaselessly we went down, farther down every tributary like arteries of briny brown water becoming brackish blue and so full of the same green and ever spreading year-round algae. And in the night, that god-awful night, we floated past caiman with cold eyes of far and awesome light. They followed us: the warmer and more vulnerable of the bayou’s ecosystem of foreign and foraging souls. And of the sojourn, our flight from death, on impossible straights of impossibly unbecoming displeasure, my brother, your company has meant everything. But this next bend into narrow and less than evergreen pine will mark our company’s end. So my flawless friend, I bid you better days and more becoming nights. From here on I leave you at the shore, moreover, I cast away the better part of my soul, sparring it a death of such degradation and deluge that was not there before. Not there in the closet, not there in half-disintegrated and forgotten tomes. Not there in any of the episodes of ever escalating life. We were not warned of sudden death, coming more like a dagger in the dark than the slow dawning of an unfamiliar day. Oily were the signs that rumored the thin stream’s expansion into torrents, rain becoming waterfalls, and then impending rocks below. And then pain becoming something queer and altogether bright. Like a forlorn star going supernova in the sky. The old man’s clamor like the insect choir’s cacophony of reverberating laments I will be heard, not shouting in the awful vice of Bosch’s hell. I will go content where there can be no death.