The Death of Miroslav Holub

It must have been evening:
the sky, already flat and lifeless,
blanketing the day's fumbles and missteps
in welcome obscurity. Yet in that burgeoning
darkness, one light shone bright, a naked bulb
piercing the attic window, engraving your room
on the retinas of night. A chair. A typewriter.

What will become of them now? Who loves the scalpel
that has fallen from the surgeon's hand? Who mourns
the microtome, when the last specimen has been
fixed and sectioned? Silence swallows them,
now that you are gone. Where once grew flowers
of vision - stamen! sepal! - flows now the
smooth concrete of a road going nowhere.
Nowhere. Into the sea. Nowhere. Off a cliff.

It must have been evening. The sky, pressing
skyscrapers down like grass, and the caryatids complaining,
because they know that tonight, with you gone, they each
have a bit more weight to carry.

July 29, 1999

Miroslav Holub was one of my favorite modern poets. He died in 1998 but I didn't find out until a year later. You can see one of his poems here.