Death’s the Classic Look

Death’s the classic look. It goes
down stoneworks carved with Latin Prose
and Poetry. And scholar’s Greek
that no one now can really speak,
though it’s all guessed at. The long view
contains bits of Etruscan, too,
(as guessed at as the Greek is, but
no one yet has figured out
more than a first few words, and those
the names for fish, bird, water, rose
painted beside the painting of
what a dead man kept to love
inside his tomb). In back of that
the view runs desert-rimmed and flat
past writings that were things, not words:
roses, water, fish, and birds.
The thing before the letters came,
the name before there was a name.
And back of things themselves? Who knows?
Jungle spells it as it grows
where the damp among the shoots
waterlogs the classic roots,
and the skulls and bones of things
last half as long as a bird sings,
as a fish swims, as a rose fills,
opens, lets out its breath, and spills
into the sockets where things crawl,
and death looks like no look at all.