TULA: Study of Death ni Barbara Cully
Study of Death
Barbara Cully
one
When i heard you say, "Water escapes me yet marks me, " you were sitting across from me blooming in a life's high season. In my office you were haunted by your blue dress, the image of it in the mirror across from you last week at the clinic. You talked about surviving the illness and your increased difficulties with the cure. A beautiful choice, blue, hanging empty across from you. Your exposed chest with its scar as a talisman. And your quietude as a protection into the end of the day. Always barely breathing, brave, you cleared your throat of everything before you spoke.
two
When I heard the news, I scattered. Out of the building onto the street, dismembered. Later on, on the beach, I would come across my limbs wandering each alone among the breakers. You slipped past me. You slipped under the conversation we were having into the eternity we talked about. Our literal feet resting on the floor and Whitman's "look for me under your boot soles" across the room. Across your forehead a curved spider dashed cleanly not announcing its escape.
three
In the Tomb of Hunting and Eating, stars float as fish: A plant has the appearance of a rope, a rope the appearance of a snake and so on: Warriors, barefoot, pictured next to the Lady of the Beasts in a sacrifice scene: Noble women on horseback, intoxicated, the sacred and the profane interwoven with punishment and loss. In subsequent panels, we see these same women as attractive grotesques turning into wild boars or wolves.
four
Of course, at the shoreline's violent end, I will also fade. We will be everywhere seeking a god who walks between the buildings and who also rages. Later, after I live my life, I get to say, near me were near the fire. You get to say, cross over; wither and fade; blossom to the sky. For a few it was the custom to go ashore when they found the madness overtaking them. Here I should mention the matter of enormous waves. Those who were seized with the battle rage became beasts, and then they flung themselves against cliff sides and the huge rocks. At dusk, the low-light fire of the world, the water dragon, the poet puffing poppies then asleep in his cave of opium. The angels, losing no time, were putting something into what we were drinking, floral rosettes, fauns, the unaccounted for taste of truffles and women.
