The Day Before After A. Diao Lavina

Bring me your masks wrapped in linen
that I may not stain them with selfish tears
on that day when I am found expertly dying
after so long a wait. They will know your name,
the nurses, and after our tinge of silence
they will give you a glass of water.

You will hide in this water
and in the lovely creases of your linen
jacket which you have worn in the silence
of libraries and jets. You will crush the tears
every time I pray your name
between each taut white sheet of dying.

Many stories are told by the dying.
For instance, I dream aloud the water
inside the sound of your name
soft as the table linen
we bought in Jatuchak I used until tears
wormed through years I ate your silence.

I loved you in that silence,
loved the numbed words dying
in your shadowed voice that tears
open stoic mountains, scars the face of water.
I've asked to be wrapped in linen
for when fire sings my name.

Just this once, say my name
like you called me in the silence
when I held you under linen
sheets. When the night was dying.
When light caught on the water
before we fell to a sleep of tears--

I don't want your tears
now. Later when stones tell my name
in voices naked as water.
I will cradle you in the silence.
I will leave my whisper in your hair, dying
like the overstayed lives of old linen.

My tears are swallowed in the linen-
wrapped and unnamed masks whose shapes are dying.
Inside this water I feel your coiled silence.