2 February 2007 | Vol. 6, No. 4
Elegy for Lee
I'd forgotten how the skull
shows through, towards the end;
how they were right,
those medieval artists,
to draw death
as a skeleton;
how death does not come
from the outside,
but how death is already inside us.
In the midst of life
we are in the midst of death.
And now she is ash,
and now her bones are ash,
and now your breath
is ash, and the skull
and the skull
and the skull.
About the author:
Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. The recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, he is currently a Chancellor's Fellow at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He teaches literature at Hunter College.
For further reading:
Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 6, No. 4, where "Elegy for Lee" ran on February 2, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry, elegy.
