Some Epigamies IX

The eyes were dead because their body was dead. A ghost-house. What is it that departs when the heartbeat ceases and where does it go. I felt my fingers were not my own, and yet not those of another, either. One imagines an extremely round stone, tiny, buried in the viscera of the abdomen. A nearby scalpel. Other tools. A mirror above the table upon which the corpse is supine. All of this turns out to be prophetic, like a voice from a thousand miles away whispering something in my sleeping ear, something as unintelligible as the aftermath of a 12-car pile-up in fog so thick it was nearly a solid. Saturn knows the answer but will not speak. The cat at my feet knows the answer, but speaks only riddles. Orbits. Of eyes and hands, of petals ’round the stamen.