Two poems from Reliquaria
Mine will be a beautiful service
1.
When you bury me, fold
my arms, neat
over the plateau
of a double-breasted suit,
the angle of the lapel
matching my now
permanent expression.
Pressed, chemical
I will look content,
but confused
as when you watched me turn
in my sleep, dreaming:
of a Golgotha
in beeswax, a coffin
for swallows, a toothless augur
reading the flights and cries
of owls. You
will hear the cadence
of my voice, the snapping
oblique of my laugh. Among the votives
and canticles, you will trace,
with the tips of your thumbs,
lines of demarcation
between the fallow of my scalp
and the dunes of my forehead.
Quiet, you will paste
stray hairs back
into their place.
2. Memento Mori
All sod and taproot now, all bulb
and tuber and stemshoot Mulch throb,
lush with worms and slugs—we are never worth
more than this
Thrum of the earth, clatter-bulge of cicada shells
along a coffin’s hinges Teak and scented cedar
flushed with compost An elegy
of rot, this counterfeit reliquary
If you each day clutch
our pillows, press them to your face, pray
to take in some atom of me all
into the hollows of your chest, yes
I promise my ghost will find you
should you want someone else to love
After this, Loving Kindness and Asanga flew
for Phebus Etienne
These church gates are locked, like yesterday,
and so I have not yet prayed
for you the right way, knelt in your memory, offered
intentions or lit chapel candles in your name.
When John told me, I was an avenue away,
reading on a gallery wall about Asanga,
who wanted Loving Kindness to meet him in a cave, who waited
and waited to talk enlightenment over Assam tea.
On that painted cotton, he wears a halo of mineral malachite,
is clothed in a dye of ground cinnabar, is flanked by the story
of his life. This is what I know now about the upper-right corner,
where a miniature Asanga flies
with the found bodhisattva and both float buoyant without need
for pinion feathers or ailerons, where they are weightless,
steering towards paradise with just their robes and arms:
Loving Kindness and Asanga flew to the Tushita heaven.
It is what I was trying to understand before I took John’s call
and he asked if I had heard about your passing
days ago, alone in your apartment, most likely from a collapse
of the heart. It is what happens after Asanga lifts
Loving Kindness up and carries him through town on his back,
the townspeople blind, as always, to the beatitudes among them.
R. A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria (U. Nebraska Press, 2014), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. New writing is forthcoming in The Wolf and American Poetry Review. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he lives in Brooklyn and London.
Twitter: @caesura
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