Postmortem

I died with the word I on my lips. It only took a moment, a slight pause as if for a line- break or a comma, a panicked thought or the time required for an 8-ball to cross the baize. I died, and the cities I harbor gave way to squalid refugee camps where the moon went through a new phase of never getting out of bed. They fed it on thin broth that tasted like a landlocked sea. And there I floated like Moses in my open casket waiting to be adopted by Mother Earth— to be somehow seen again, if only by the mute-belled lilies of the valley and their brawny, tawny bee.