Fidel is dead; his year of birth is a rhyming
one—the year of Elizabeth II’s birth,
the year my father was born in Warri.
Who remembers the names of the women
perched between thighs to enact the ordinary
act of gathering the slippery bloody flesh?
Their survival is another rhyming song;
to think that there in Cuba or England
or Nigeria, there may well have been
a cottage in the woods, abandoned suddenly—
a missionary leaving to follow a wife
back to her village in the North where
she preferred to die, or some veteran
pensioner succumbing to the shrapnel
in his skull and the madness of shell-
shock; or some landed gentry, rushing
to Havana to collect a child abandoned
by a man fleeing his demons. She will
never return to their cottage in the hills.
They all leave broken bread, two tumblers,
one half-full of bourbon, the other empty,
set on a table covered in cloth. It will
take decades for the ants to consume
this to nothing, decades before all
we will find in the dark cottage are two
musty tumblers, like a message of how
love dies, how the world continues on
its way. Come, December, the air grows sharp
as glass, and we think of our days
as our future. The living continue,
the dead do not care as much,
and we continue as we always have.