burial

                                       he is still not better not been not no where not here lives a still a quiet a life he cradles he holds a hand whose veins blue thick pulsing up and out and along show him where he is going
                                       bury me under the fig tree the man he was about to fall in love with said early on and they make a joke of it this burying as if the burying the burial does not is not coming near
                                       he’s renting so it won’t be an option this burying the man he’s in love with under the fig but somehow now when he looks when he sees the fig he sees a tree feeding on a body
                                       this is not what the man he loves wants this fig feeding suburban burial although thinking he would eventually make it into the bats’ mouths and stomachs makes him smile
                                       a vegetarian for almost fifty years the man dreams of not being buried he dreams of his body being driven out and away from the city of his body being left for a scavenger a wild eating
                                       he makes a promise promises many things tries to imagine the end of the man he is in love with fails makes more promises tries to remember that either of them could go at any time
                                       but there are three generations between them he knows he thinks he knows that it is he who will be doing the burying that it will not be under the fig tree or by fang and acid but by flame
                                       this ash making is for the man’s daughters who could not bear the thought of him being torn being swallowed and turned in the night and how to find the grave what is a burial without a grave
                                       might be the question they ask the whole world is a grave is what he might answer before he goes back to the before of having met the man before the joke about the fig tree and a blue map held
                                       before a place made in each others’ bodies exactly the size of their forearms and hands before his unbidden laugh that threw itself against a goldred dawn sky and tore open the gullet of love