Onion Songs

A DREAM OF THE DEAD

The dead dream all night the life we have this morning. They love the way we, who know so little of sleep, try to drive it from our bodies with the day’s first yawn.

Almost as much as they love the bright yellow of egg on plates they used to own.

Almost as much as they love the sadness of cupboards, and the years tucked inside so carelessly, with no thought of meaning, or the eventual shape of it all, lying in the dust disarrayed.

They watch us from the rough boles of forgotten trees, the ones left unnoticed between the buildings and on the edges of town, sharing the space with termites and fairies, and the carved-in promises, to names whose faces are now beyond the reach of even imagination, whose pronunciation is the arcane prayer we make as our eyes close, too soon, at the end of the day.

But compared to the dead we are a quiet breed. We hold onto longings for decades without speaking their facts. We’ll strangle our children before speaking our minds. The dead recognize our problems with the truth, for they have seen us tremble so many times in the wake of their passing.

How often have we seen that color, that pale color unlike any other, astray in the last moments of sunset, a thread of it tracing the slant of the spring rain, and just a touch around the eyes of the child we love past reason? It’s the color of a dead mother’s heart, but we cannot bring ourselves to say so.

And this absence that swells the lungs with shadow, this despair that cannot be whispered or even shouted away, it is this spirit now which animates our days.

The dead understand these things and more. The dead know the music of diminishment and the deceit that bolsters joy. The dead wrap themselves in garments of exhaustion so they might pass unnoticed from night into light. The dead are the rags and the mud, the lamp and the lungs, the stab and the limp and the vulture’s singing mouth of the world. The dead yawn even as we yawn but their throats are yellowed and poisoned by the souring energy of the world. The flowers they hold in their glowing hands have been stolen from the poor, blossoms turning to ash as the dead glide wearily through the world. Their eyes are bald of lashes, turning to glass and scabs as they spread like felons through the world, committing their crimes against crab and dove, child and falcon as they saturate every promising landscape of the world.

For every quiet snowfall is a cold comfort pulled over the dead. Every wayward smile is food for their whispers, every shaded ravine a quarry for the hiss, the whistle, the endless complaint, and whine of the dead. Every butterfly swollen with dusk plays the priest for their hollow pleadings. Every shy and unknowing gesture becomes an invitation for their helmeted kiss.

For this is the truth of it, the tribulation, and the detour: the armies of the dead have made a carnival of our small disasters. Within their hidden elevators they descend the grave height from reason into those secret places where even the best of us aspire to fool.

I tell you we’d be better off killing them, if we only had the method, if we only had the time.