2023 Commended - Erin Bishop, 'Eulogies To Things That Have Not Yet Died'

ERIN BISHOP

Commended - 2023 Tower Poetry Competition, 'The Planets'

 

Eulogies To Things That Have Not Yet Died

Saturn’s rings are disappearing, you know,

my sister tells me over breakfast -

mouth jam-sticky, sun spilling over her shoulders.

I read it in an article in The Atlantic,

gravity and sunlight wear them thinner and thinner, until-

For the rest of the day, I carry this bitter truth on my tongue,

jaw clenched, rolling it like a pearl that never wears down.

 

When the evening sun slips away,

I wonder if there’s summer on Saturn: sweltering, cruel,

stammering for breath under the weight of August.

I settle by the window, look out over swathes of city,

you can convince yourself, with practice,

to see something you know isn’t there –

finding faces in popcorn ceilings, hotel wallpaper.

Like Saturn, I am thinning under the sun:

stretched like a skin you can see right through.

 

Naked now, Saturn turns in on itself, a dog scared sick.

A god made small by fitful sleep,

so hungry it hurts but too angry to eat.

I think of the saints, of boyish Jeanne, her rage,

insurmountable. How they bound her to the pyre –

will Saturn go quietly, or loud, brash, burning?

 

The rings are young, my sister says,

as young as celestial bodies can be.

I think of bible verses, to be made of dust and to return to it,

how we’re both made up of the same few atoms:

me, young too, so alive, and then this.

Something that had never lived but had died all the same.

 

A million miles between us, a distance

so wide I cannot even begin to understand it.

This is the acceptable kind of death: too far away to touch.

I think of Leonard Cohen’s letter.

When the veil between living and dying is thinnest,

stretched like a skin you can see right through:

If you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

Goodbye, old friend. Endless love.

See you down the road.

 

Saturn’s rings are disappearing, you know,

I tell my friend over the bustle of the school cafeteria,

nails bitten to the quick with dread.

Not in this lifetime, or the next, or the next,

Going slowly, but going still.