Bequest

When last words ablate and death is exhumed
When harmony collapses on a lifetime in tune
In the closing climax, mind and body quiver
Into one final shudder plunges rhythm’s red river
      Tremulous yet unshakably benign
And the celestial dance resumes.

From rhythm’s black hole, a wave breaks away
Sound become matter in physical dismay
But the wave propagates, oblivious to Law
A duality of functions: an aide memoire
      Or an agent of change
And often synchronically grey.

In grief’s trough our eyes lose the peak of the wave
Confusing the now with the days gone away
In a subconscious effort to sever the tie
Neurons decay while at synapses vie
      For the road to the substantia nigra
By amnesia the road is unpaved.

But at times we are dowsed by a torrent unseen
Just moments before, now revived as a dream
By memory’s lapses retracing synapses
Awake now as rhythm, the memory elapses
      A wave weighing nothing and all:
Our matter bequest is our rhythm sublime
      Which, as harmony betrays us at the brink of our time
      And collapses on the medley of body and mind,
      Persists as a wave in a squall.