Above Me Perched in Air

Above me perched in air I thought I saw

The Dove of Death, moth eyed, and with a beak

Snapping like a kite's, and in his claws

He held a nosegay of sweet smelling flowers.

It was a room long haunted, long disused.

The door clapped shut behind me as I stood

Aghast. A little light came through

The painted transom showing the cracked wall.

I looked, but in the dark the Dove had gone,

If he existed. Yet I could not doubt.

There was a tainted sweetness in the air

Of ripeness gone to rot, of nipped buds.

Paralyzed I stood. I seemed to hear

The stroke of heavy wings in the closed air,

And each slow stroke upon my lips was breath,

An icy draft that swept up from the floor.

Whose life was lived here, retching out his days?

Futility, disease so filled the room

With a sick loathing that though I would resist,

I snarled, an animal, and longed to die.

Oh Christ, I smelled the odor of my fall,

The sour fetid mud from which I crawled,

The carrion claws scratching through my skin

To climb with legs of illness up the wall.

Eyes in that dark may see what daylight shuns:

I saw a world of squirming bestial things

Stinging to life each other, and overhead

The effigy of a dove withholding death.