AFTERLIFE

In the years before we died, we puttered
inside our houses while motorcycles
and leaf blowers roared and groaned in savage
rage and pain outside, and if our old black
Bakelite telephones, squatting silent 
amidst motley clutter like abstract statues
of outsized toads, should ever jangle
as of old, startling dust motes into dance
in stale air, it would be only robot voices
calling to beg or scare us into giving up
our secret numbers. Land lines, our tablet-
thumbing grandchildren sneered, sounding
like land mines to worn-out ears. Ever more
we missed long-dead dear ones, and as we drift-
dozed in our recliner rockers we dreamt
of ecstatic embraces in paradise
and hanging out forever in infinite bliss
with those who’d always laughed at our jokes
and listened to our old stories, no matter
how often we told them. So imagine
our disappointment when the warmest friends
of our salad days greeted us with polite,
unsurprised indifference and turned back
to talk with their netherworld new friends 
without bothering to introduce us.
If we stepped outside the crimson domes
to escape the almost unbearable heat
of the bonfires that sparkled across black
infinity, our sole eternal scenery,
cold immediately seemed to seize us.
Strange, because we had no bodies anymore,
or personalities, for that matter.
Nonetheless, this had to be the nicest place
since we’d always been the nicest people,
and everyone took turns either complaining
or saying, “It is what it is,” with a curt shrug.
Nevertheless, we’d arrived trailing thoughts
like clouds of exhaust smoke, and these grew
to become a single yearning that looked ever- 
forward to a rewarding afterdeath. 

CICERO

When Cicero picked up Lentulus
at his house to walk him to his execution, 
of what did they converse? 
Too clever to believe the afterlife 
amounts to much, Cicero 
probably declaimed on Glory,
how virtuous souls gain 
eternal renown. Like Achilles,
striding through Hades’ dreary mists,
gloating on his fame. The town 
was still brick and wood then,
not yet marbleized. A stench 
from rot and raw sewage
that would make us retch and squint
out tears was just urban air 
these Romans ignored for Empire. 
A V-tailed kite hovered 
above the new Temple of Juno, 
but signs unseen are no signs.

Lost in eloquence, Cicero forgot
to hike up his toga, letting it
trail in the muck. Lentulus
would suddenly turn and bend
from his erect and silent display 
of arrogant nonchalance
to spit into some loutish face
jeering in the gauntlet line
that the mob, aroused for circus
more than civic rage, allowed
this death procession for space.

Under the Tullianum portal, 
Cicero made courteous regrets 
for failing to come in, 
another engagement, he said, 
beckoning to a slave to hand 
Lentulus a parcel of figs 
from his villa in Tusculum. Ad astra, 
he elocuted for the crowd
to hear, deeds and crimes of men 
appear as alike as fluffy seeds 
that gust loose and fly aloft 
on summer breezes to our eyes
that death makes newly wise.