Bonsai
Death horrifies the relatives abroad.
There’s a plane to be caught, a walnut cake that’ll give me ulcers
to be swallowed, a tongue to be burned with hot coffee,
and for lack of a farewell letter Life or the The Economist to be read.
There are no articles for a section headed Culture in the Sundays.
Just articles on how to arrange your house, garden, paradise.
The telegram I sent travels with me,
but in business class. The man in the post office counted the words three times
as though they were an extinct species. Like a language that can be preserved
when there are just two women who don’t know each other but gossip about the same man.
There are such women on my mother’s side. The husband died yesterday.
And there are chairs at home I’ve never sat on,
with hard seats, reserved for the domestic saints
who come home only for funerals and weddings.
From now on we’ll be giving each other relics as presents
on the anniversaries of the insurance policy
against damage caused by death.
The living charge for each death. With a small packet of paper handkerchiefs,
with new black knee-length stockings, with announcements on the LCD TV screen.
After the funeral I lie under the tree of life
like a bonsai waiting for the children of the dead one to play with it.
My veins shiver, my roots strain to hear the dead
who gurgle like little water heaters
and sprinkle hot water into my drop of dew.
It was so much easier when death was in God’s hands,
when at nighttime I dried the river under the window with a hair dryer,
when the soldier bought me a carton of popcorn.
And now I even have a hobby: I go to commemoration services
for people I don’t know. On the way back my stomach swells with all the fizzy drinks.
With speeches written double-spaced on the loss that’s befallen us
here and now. We shall follow in his steps.
I drink blood-donors’ blood and already I feel better. You should try it.
Put your life in order with the lottery ticket
and never cross out more than seven numbers. Because you too
have been tickled as a baby:
“I’ll eat you up, I’ll eat you up…” Love is the natural state
of cannibals. The others lie around on leather sofas
and bet on the last five minutes of Jesus’s glory.
Will he be born, will he die, or be resurrected?
Messages will keep coming on the dead one’s e-mail
offers will keep piling up,
“Lose 5 kilos in 7 days, no charge.”
And the tree of life will keep shrinking, the meat will keep diminishing
around the bone until it vitiates
the five meals a day, until it becomes a bonsai.
The only border between there and here is the plane’s small window.
There I’m a tree for the timber industry, here I’m a little tree for meditation.
Life as usual mocks relatives abroad.
One must endure the flight, buy “travel fit” perfumes,
shut oneself up in the loo and pee for a long, long time,
until down there, on the grave, my bonsai becomes a tree with a shadow,
and then, in the absence of a will, read the Financial or the Sunday Times.
On Sundays there is no section headed Life.
Just articles on the arrangement of the subconscious, of the ego, of hell.
