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Elizabeth Howkins

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The Caretaker

She moves among the dead, like a fish among plankton,
clipping off their smiles and arranging them
on the shore of the river like shells.

She wraps them in cool linen, folding the arms
about the bodies like ivory fans.
She secures each package with the ribbon of her breath.

Their hands are empty. They have gone and left their lives
behind them, like bundles tossed in the wake
of a departing train.

As she works, her skirt catches on the hems of their
shadows and her feet slip on the light that oozes
from the silk of their skulls - strange sap falling
from pale deciduous stars.

In her crisp garden, the moon is a circle of gold paper,
the lythrum, a thin wishbone of amethyst glass
and the birds are folded stiff from bits of rice
paper dipped in tea.

Death has a certain perfection that will not be trifled with
and, drawing its borders hard with a calligraphers brush,
lays down in flat black ink certain rules of the game.

She knows that she too will soon be a player; that she too
will become a goddess, worthy of candles and hymns.
In time she will perch above them, a cotton cloud angel on a
green plastic tree; her little brow encircled by swallows;
her feet embedded like a shard of crystal in the bone of the
quarter moon.

 

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