Lines in the Nature of an Epitaph

Take the "e" out of dead
and it's dad

there upon the shelf.
Or a portion of himself,
carbonized and sealed tight

in a small, decorative urn.

I watched you burn
and to energy return,
and to memory (like ash
all too easily scattered
and lost) turn.

A rite of passage
for each of us.

I moved into a world without you,
you moved from flesh to dust
(and, of course, as noted previously
memory and energy).

A decorative urn.
A tender space in my heart.
A liberated soul
infusing
Eternity.

there are, I suppose,
worse things
to be.

- for my father, Kenneth Cody (1947-2004) -

- Team 13, pencil, 1985 -

From Emma Jason's Dream Journal (10/95)

The dream is not always the same.

Sometimes the man in the black suit enters the room backwards, so that I hear him speak before I see the dreadful leer of his face.

There is, in the man in black's face, something deeply. . . unsettling. Beyond the constant expression it wears of mingled derision and sickly, unwholesome smile, there is in the features of the face itself more than the suggestion of deformity, distortion.

It is nothing easily identified. A certain asymmetry, perhaps. As if the face had been split in two and reassembled by inexpert hands. Maybe it is the dark and deeply set eyes like black holes in the skull, tugging at everything in the room, sucking even the light into themselves.

Feral

I put my Sadness on a leash
and walked it
up the block and down.

I trained my Sadness
to heel and sit
and showed it all over town.

"So well bred," people said.
"And behaved!" others raved
about the sadness by my side.

While at home, unallowed
to roam, my Gladness neglected
by slow degrees died.

When I was out one day
it wasted away
and my Sadness the tiny corpse devoured.

Now, at the end of a shrinking leash
my Sadness grows uncontrolled
and I am a constant cower.

Immense as The Night,
my Sadness,
huge as The Rolling Sea:

and I know,
that like my Gladness,
it will soon make a snack of me.

- Richard Cody, '04 -