PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[Acquired December, 1977; 

died Sunday, June 7, 1980]

You came to us in that month when Aurore

began to unravel my life as it was.

Your instictinctive dislike of her---your failed

attempts to escape her grasp---should have warned

me of the impending debacle.  The

great shell on your back, far larger than your

tiny body would serve as metaphor,

in the dismal days and emptied nights that

invariably followed and recalled
January ninth of 'seventy-eight.

On that afternoon of hot tears like knives,

and that night of terrors of dreadful dreams,

you scuttled about the acquarium

pushing the gravel floor around as if

to wrest my attention from the slowly

receding slices of my life as they

fell into the pit of intangible

memory.  Shreds of lettuce purloined from

the cafeteria sustained you, and

a bit of cold water to drink.  You spent

the following summer with me in my

parents' house, keeping the secret they could

not possibly have comprehended then---

my incessant, funereal sorrow.

September, back to the campus, and then

Lady Cecily's dramatic entrance

into the hollows and shallows of my

haunted life that she could not have hallowed;

but brought two years of a settled routine,

and the regular satisfactions of

my happily adolescent lustings.

At my parents' house, on that bright Sunday,

just after graduation, and our swift

escape from the campus once and for all

with middle fingers extended upright

toward that which we had gladly abandoned:

you escaped your hard shell once and for all

and died---I hope without pain---quietly

exposed in that room's darkness before dawn.

Starward

[*/+/^]