Timor Mortis
By
Jack D. Harvey
We make him dress up
hooded cloak, scythe and skull
the Grim Reaper,
put a name to it
sinister slapstick
to cover the skeleton he is.
Furtive footsteps
heard but not seen
in the wooly uncertain night,
in the darkened hospital ward,
in your last agony;
he's always eager for our passing
to sate him, bate
the restless life around him;
his petty noise in your delirium,
the ghost of sound
echoing against old men's ears,
against the baby's tiny shell of an ear,
against the nightingale's sweet
voice, captivating;
all these and others competing
for your last glimmer of attention
on your way out.
When he comes, when he comes,
the soft schuss of a shot skier
making his lone descent.
These sounds and your last movements
pure and simple as moonlight
and the trees bending in the wind
come together, foretell the end,
one way or another,
peaceful, resigned, painful, brutal,
in our midst, death, like clockwork,
regular and familiar as the morning sun.
Even in the last extreme
hardly ever do we say "enough!"
and mean it,
grasping for one more day
one more blink of an eye
one more good green spring
we continue to hope,
until cut to the quick,
stopped cold,
we hear his voice say come
and away we go
leaving all we know behind,
departing for whatever
eternity holds of emptiness,
of death, of nothing,
of even less than nothing.
Limitless, hidden beyond horizons
the gape of the unknown;
at the end of the road
undisclosed forever what fate
that fearsome spectre,
voluminously berobed,
that everlasting mystery
holds for all of us
in his bony emphatic hand.
Enter the Apocalypse
Now sense some coming apocalypse,
now expect some ripe recipe
for total disaster;
in the first nanoseconds
of God's hideous anger,
fortified with worse than
fire and brimstone,
the earth, our mother,
overcome, overcooked,
glows hot and red,
our red-hot mama
can't be saved;
the heat, the deadly radiation
patiently
seek our bones, our marrow, our cells.
From Pensacola to Beijing
and all points west, east,
north, south, everything
dead or alive,
rocks to rooks
to cats to Kathy next door
burnt to a crisp;
look at the charred trees
in the garden of Eden
where Eve's lovely breasts
and the rest of her used to sit;
the patient farmer turned to charcoal
along with his plough;
even the dead and buried wake,
turn and peer up
through bone holes, wormy eyes;
some citizens see nothing
but the removal of agriculture
in their situation,
an end to the fertile earth;
others, passing on from
a life of faulty digestion,
sour guts and Paregoric
show faith in the power of death;
no hurt to them, this ravishing terminus.
The typewriter building in Rome,
the Taj Mahal, Saint Peter's dome,
start to smoke, then
in the blink of an eye,
like fiery wedding cakes
go up in a blaze;
oceans boil away, roaring their anguish,
their seasoning burning in white heaps;
the glaciers cry away their
mass in floods of icy water;
mountains melt like butter,
rained on by the corona
of some enormous nearby sun.
The shroud of death spreads over
the broad burning earth and
then the horror of too much Assyrian orange
takes away resemblance from everything,
leaving the remains of blackened bits and pieces,
unidentified debris, piles of nothing
turning to dust and less than dust.
We don't have enough time for all of it,
over the eons slowly creeping
and no need describing
the whole extinction, my fellow shareholders;
a spectacular dish for special occasions,
but expensive and terminal;
beyond its horribly radiant gate,
beyond God's towering cloud of wrath,
wherever he is,
there is nothing.
In the Morgue
The body on the tiles
seems cold
as a block of ice;
all signs of life
have flown the coop.
For the living
the wailing wall
waits outside,
dark as oil;
time goes rolling on,
steady as a wheel.
God’s will be done;
His word and deed
breaking all bounds,
including His own.
Death itself,
confronting His
absolute logic,
goes limp as a noodle.
God’s will is doom;
his extraordinary quirks
shy chaos
into the wilderness,
among the other outcasts.
By the same finger
that blasted the king’s wall,
the body is resurrected,
a brand-new loaf of bread,
the bread of life, the true bread,
the word of God.
Wondering, wandering,
embodied again,
the spirit asks no questions,
hove to in a sea of blood;
home is here.
Give us this day,
weighed one way,
our daily beef,
our sacred host.
Give us, O Lord,
no miracles, please,
light as flies,
to tip the scales.
God’s will be done,
but for eternity
can a universe be,
whirl within curly whirl,
steady complex
planetarium of eternal law,
carrack always on
an even keel?
Or can it come unstuck?
Can it become cracked
like an old china pot,
or perfectly and forever intact?
These are ores unfound
and unmined.
The body is cold
as a mackerel,
feet, legs, trunk, head,
sunk forever,
bound to the rules
of a dark kingdom
and do we care?
We’re uncaring as bees,
busy about
the best things in life,
buzzing around nectar,
trying to make things sweet,
trying to stay alive
in a nice way.
The body is cold,
a conductor of
the unknown,
a train of cold
going nowhere.
Morticians meander
in and out,
doing the necessary;
it matters not
to the corpse,
cold and dead,
a stricken ferry
sinking in a
surfeited sea,
to the unfathomable deep.
Cold and dead,
the body lies,
a market offering,
glass-cased
among the legumes,
the fish and the lamb;
no way no how
to cheat the fates or
the laws of nature.
The corpse
by no fell stroke,
by no hocus-pocus,
ever recalled
from the back of beyond.
It lies there forever.
The body ain’t a body anymore;
it’s gone,
diminished to a naught,
to less than nothing.
Human fate you say,
this is the way it is,
well, well,
alas and ho-hum,
like leaves of the passing year
we come and go;
more windy talk
from the pulpit, at the gravesite
bottomless, meaningless;
but say it anyway.
Goodbye life, hello
portico of wealthy King Dis.
Your coin good here, mortal,
and will buy your passage
to a kingdom built on time
and money.
Two pennies for
the fare, for a stay
that lasts forever,
where a day
outlasts the gold,
the silver, the copper;
your coins cheap metal
for your reckoning
with the dim realm,
where all the glitters
are the eyes of the dead.
Have no fears, penny-wise;
step forth pound-foolish
and assured
from the heaving ferry;
hell has no furies,
no denying spirits;
only the dead,
mile after mile of them
decked out and penitent
and hell will last, thank God,
among monuments, a monument
more durable than the sin of Adam,
than all our sins.
The body is cold, now
remote as the moon.
For the noble mourning kindred
noble love and death
go forth
hand in hand
and the rest of us struggle along;
illusions become elusive
among our daily crusts
and bumpkins
and our dearest
bump us out of the park,
this dump called Paradise.
We struggle along,
bound for a rude awakening
in that last call to arms.
Body cold, body
politic, fetch
the means of meaning;
of being here for a while
in some peace.
Puissant bird of dawn,
take me, too, when it’s
time to go.
Longer is too much;
still, the body is cold,
still,
even here in the land
of blood.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and divides his time between his home in upstate New York and his plantation in South Carolina. He once owned a cat who could whistle “Sweet Adeline,” use a knife and fork and killed a postman.
By
Jack D. Harvey
We make him dress up
hooded cloak, scythe and skull
the Grim Reaper,
put a name to it
sinister slapstick
to cover the skeleton he is.
Furtive footsteps
heard but not seen
in the wooly uncertain night,
in the darkened hospital ward,
in your last agony;
he's always eager for our passing
to sate him, bate
the restless life around him;
his petty noise in your delirium,
the ghost of sound
echoing against old men's ears,
against the baby's tiny shell of an ear,
against the nightingale's sweet
voice, captivating;
all these and others competing
for your last glimmer of attention
on your way out.
When he comes, when he comes,
the soft schuss of a shot skier
making his lone descent.
These sounds and your last movements
pure and simple as moonlight
and the trees bending in the wind
come together, foretell the end,
one way or another,
peaceful, resigned, painful, brutal,
in our midst, death, like clockwork,
regular and familiar as the morning sun.
Even in the last extreme
hardly ever do we say "enough!"
and mean it,
grasping for one more day
one more blink of an eye
one more good green spring
we continue to hope,
until cut to the quick,
stopped cold,
we hear his voice say come
and away we go
leaving all we know behind,
departing for whatever
eternity holds of emptiness,
of death, of nothing,
of even less than nothing.
Limitless, hidden beyond horizons
the gape of the unknown;
at the end of the road
undisclosed forever what fate
that fearsome spectre,
voluminously berobed,
that everlasting mystery
holds for all of us
in his bony emphatic hand.
Enter the Apocalypse
Now sense some coming apocalypse,
now expect some ripe recipe
for total disaster;
in the first nanoseconds
of God's hideous anger,
fortified with worse than
fire and brimstone,
the earth, our mother,
overcome, overcooked,
glows hot and red,
our red-hot mama
can't be saved;
the heat, the deadly radiation
patiently
seek our bones, our marrow, our cells.
From Pensacola to Beijing
and all points west, east,
north, south, everything
dead or alive,
rocks to rooks
to cats to Kathy next door
burnt to a crisp;
look at the charred trees
in the garden of Eden
where Eve's lovely breasts
and the rest of her used to sit;
the patient farmer turned to charcoal
along with his plough;
even the dead and buried wake,
turn and peer up
through bone holes, wormy eyes;
some citizens see nothing
but the removal of agriculture
in their situation,
an end to the fertile earth;
others, passing on from
a life of faulty digestion,
sour guts and Paregoric
show faith in the power of death;
no hurt to them, this ravishing terminus.
The typewriter building in Rome,
the Taj Mahal, Saint Peter's dome,
start to smoke, then
in the blink of an eye,
like fiery wedding cakes
go up in a blaze;
oceans boil away, roaring their anguish,
their seasoning burning in white heaps;
the glaciers cry away their
mass in floods of icy water;
mountains melt like butter,
rained on by the corona
of some enormous nearby sun.
The shroud of death spreads over
the broad burning earth and
then the horror of too much Assyrian orange
takes away resemblance from everything,
leaving the remains of blackened bits and pieces,
unidentified debris, piles of nothing
turning to dust and less than dust.
We don't have enough time for all of it,
over the eons slowly creeping
and no need describing
the whole extinction, my fellow shareholders;
a spectacular dish for special occasions,
but expensive and terminal;
beyond its horribly radiant gate,
beyond God's towering cloud of wrath,
wherever he is,
there is nothing.
In the Morgue
The body on the tiles
seems cold
as a block of ice;
all signs of life
have flown the coop.
For the living
the wailing wall
waits outside,
dark as oil;
time goes rolling on,
steady as a wheel.
God’s will be done;
His word and deed
breaking all bounds,
including His own.
Death itself,
confronting His
absolute logic,
goes limp as a noodle.
God’s will is doom;
his extraordinary quirks
shy chaos
into the wilderness,
among the other outcasts.
By the same finger
that blasted the king’s wall,
the body is resurrected,
a brand-new loaf of bread,
the bread of life, the true bread,
the word of God.
Wondering, wandering,
embodied again,
the spirit asks no questions,
hove to in a sea of blood;
home is here.
Give us this day,
weighed one way,
our daily beef,
our sacred host.
Give us, O Lord,
no miracles, please,
light as flies,
to tip the scales.
God’s will be done,
but for eternity
can a universe be,
whirl within curly whirl,
steady complex
planetarium of eternal law,
carrack always on
an even keel?
Or can it come unstuck?
Can it become cracked
like an old china pot,
or perfectly and forever intact?
These are ores unfound
and unmined.
The body is cold
as a mackerel,
feet, legs, trunk, head,
sunk forever,
bound to the rules
of a dark kingdom
and do we care?
We’re uncaring as bees,
busy about
the best things in life,
buzzing around nectar,
trying to make things sweet,
trying to stay alive
in a nice way.
The body is cold,
a conductor of
the unknown,
a train of cold
going nowhere.
Morticians meander
in and out,
doing the necessary;
it matters not
to the corpse,
cold and dead,
a stricken ferry
sinking in a
surfeited sea,
to the unfathomable deep.
Cold and dead,
the body lies,
a market offering,
glass-cased
among the legumes,
the fish and the lamb;
no way no how
to cheat the fates or
the laws of nature.
The corpse
by no fell stroke,
by no hocus-pocus,
ever recalled
from the back of beyond.
It lies there forever.
The body ain’t a body anymore;
it’s gone,
diminished to a naught,
to less than nothing.
Human fate you say,
this is the way it is,
well, well,
alas and ho-hum,
like leaves of the passing year
we come and go;
more windy talk
from the pulpit, at the gravesite
bottomless, meaningless;
but say it anyway.
Goodbye life, hello
portico of wealthy King Dis.
Your coin good here, mortal,
and will buy your passage
to a kingdom built on time
and money.
Two pennies for
the fare, for a stay
that lasts forever,
where a day
outlasts the gold,
the silver, the copper;
your coins cheap metal
for your reckoning
with the dim realm,
where all the glitters
are the eyes of the dead.
Have no fears, penny-wise;
step forth pound-foolish
and assured
from the heaving ferry;
hell has no furies,
no denying spirits;
only the dead,
mile after mile of them
decked out and penitent
and hell will last, thank God,
among monuments, a monument
more durable than the sin of Adam,
than all our sins.
The body is cold, now
remote as the moon.
For the noble mourning kindred
noble love and death
go forth
hand in hand
and the rest of us struggle along;
illusions become elusive
among our daily crusts
and bumpkins
and our dearest
bump us out of the park,
this dump called Paradise.
We struggle along,
bound for a rude awakening
in that last call to arms.
Body cold, body
politic, fetch
the means of meaning;
of being here for a while
in some peace.
Puissant bird of dawn,
take me, too, when it’s
time to go.
Longer is too much;
still, the body is cold,
still,
even here in the land
of blood.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and divides his time between his home in upstate New York and his plantation in South Carolina. He once owned a cat who could whistle “Sweet Adeline,” use a knife and fork and killed a postman.
