| Silt |  |
| By Paul Mariani | |||
| Monday, 04 April 2011 | |||
| How it steals up on you, this mortality, dropping its calling card, say, after the flight back from your friend’s wedding, six kinds of wine on a stone veranda overlooking the starlit sea while migrants labor in the fields beneath. One morning you bend down to lace your sneakers and find your leg stiff as a base- ball bat. How many times you told yourself Death wouldn’t catch you unaware, the way, alas, it did so many of your friends. That you’d hie yourself off to the hospital at the first sign of trouble. And then, when it should happen, as it has, you go into denial once again, while your poor leg whimpers for attention, until at last you get the doctor, who finds a fourteen-inch blood clot silting up your veins there on the sonar. Mortality’s the sticking thinners twice each day into your stomach, until the skin screams a preternatural black and blue. Mortality’s swallowing the stuff they use to hemorrhage mice. It’s botched blood tests for months on end. Admit it, what's more boring than listening to another’s troubles, except thumbing through postcards of others on vacation. Friendly Finland, Warsaw in July. Mortality’s my leg, her arm, your heart. Besides, who gives a damn about the plight of others except the saints and God? But isn't death the mother of us all? Shouldn’t death mean caring, the moving out at last beyond the narrow self? But who has time for that? Six wines on a stone veranda, stars, a summer moon high over Santa Monica, cigars from verboten old Havana, live jazz. That’s what one wants. That, and not some blood clot clogging up one's veins. No poet will ever touch again what Dante somehow touched there at the Paradiso’s end. It was there he had St. Bernard beseech his Lady to look upon him that she might grant him light and understanding, which he might share in turn with others. Lady, cast thine eyes, I pray thee, down towards me. I cannot take much height, though God knows I've tried. Six wines, two cigars, a summer moon over the veranda, where I kept tilting outwards, my veins absorbing even then the gravitas of silting while Love was busy moving the sun and other stars.
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