Tiny Black Hairs

[Caro]

Tiny Black Hairs

It took a year to comprehend what I saw
When my grief was fresh and raw and ragged
I gagged and cried and dribbled
Over his dead body. There, his hair
Freshly washed, did it keep growing
Fingernails and toenails, would they grow and curl
Like unfurling blades of tender shoots
Underneath the ground, entwined with roots?
For there, five days after death
No breath moved his hardened chest
Resting cold upon a hardened block
I touched his face in awful shock
Saw his details one last time
And noticed on his stately nose
Tiny black hairs, curled at the ends
They grew with force, pushed through the skin
But in life there they had never been.
I put it to the back of my thoughts
And proceeded to mourn my brother dead
Dealt with the pain that each day brought
His smile, his image burned in my mind
His shadowed nose I left behind
Those hairs that grew out of his face
Those hairs that were so out of place
(Did he shave it daily clean again?)

…The funeral home haunts me, the images seem
To wrap around me like a terrible dream
That I can never leave behind in sleep –
My brother drowned in waters deep.
He fell like a stone from the summer sky
Or like a piano from a building high
He fell with excitement upon his face
He hit the river lacking grace
Slammed into that surface of liquid brown
Expecting the water all the way down
But finding concrete instead,
Within minutes, he was dead.

I wondered how death could make hair grow
Where none had been – his heart stopped beating
His eyes stopped blinking and he stopped breathing, yet
On the cold and handsome nose, new hairs show.

Oh tiny hairs, you mock my pain!
He’s dead and will never smile again
Will not live or love or procreate
You grew on his face a little too late.
You grew on his face a little too late.

Now here before the mirror I wash my own
It’s red and puffy and stained from tears
Mourning all his unlived years
And all the tears have burned my face
Replaced my beauty with deformations
And sealed the pain upon my skin,
Locked all the misery and sadness in
Like an anti-beauty cream
Or so it seemed as my reflections
Showed the lines and blemishes
My wishes of deepest lament:

Let him live again
(I freeze my face with ice)
Let him breathe again
(I scrub ‘til it is angry red)
Let him sweat again
(I cannot yet go to bed)
Let him laugh again
(I pick at spots, I make them worse)

Then suddenly, it came to me
What it was that changed his skin
I understood what happened then
No different than my ritual
The dredging of my pliant skin
I thought in that reflective place –
The new hair grown on his young dead face
Was not hair at all; now I know
Death squeezed the blackheads from his nose.

[Weedguru_Dusk]

Very touching Caro