Newly-shaved,
his face feels oddly porous in the morning air, the exposed flesh absorbent and
thick with moisture, as if in the absence of each individual bristle of beard
his every follicle had pooled with water.
Approaching
the cremation site he suffers to again recall how his departed guest had
staggered naked and delirious about the pyre before collapsing into the ground,
an unbearable bellowing, both pitiful and plangent, seeming to erupt
ceaselessly from off the surface of his entire body, the mouth alone of no size
for the expressing of so great a grief.
The
damp and blackened grass is more empty than he could have hoped, and he is
surprised, grateful too, at there being so little left through which to sift,
kneeling now and raking his hands this way and back through the scorched blades
and their detritus.
Even
with the coin at last located, it is as if his fingers remain empty; the
surface of the skinny disc coated thick with carbon, its surface burnt
impenetrably black and impervious to the scrape of his thumbnail, still it
remains weightless, remains thus as if unfound, and that dark circle upon his
palm nothing more than a retinal after-image of the vague sun, its perfect
circle cookie-cut from the gauze of covering cloud.
Rubbed
between his thumb and index finger the coin’s texture retains nothing of its
origin, not even a residual sense of metal.
There
is rain now, which he understands as such, though he cannot source those words
he hears himself suddenly to speak
deleted
name: You cannot bandage fucking ashes.
reciting
from memory a poem the words of which he has once again cause to recall, saying
deleted
name: "Another child to waltz the ash, waltz the ash and perish. Whose
charcoal footfalls powdered rise, powdered rise and perish. Life is finite.
Life is finite. Waltz the ash, ye dead."
