Death at the Opera

Is this what death is like? I sit

Dressed elegantly in black and white, in an expensive seat,

Watching Violetta expire in Covent Garden.

How beautiful she is. As her voice lures me toward her death

The strings of the orchestra moisten my eyes with tears,

Though the tenor is too loud. Is this what death is like?

No one moves. Violetta coughs; stumbles toward the bed.

Twenty miles away in the country my father is dying.

Violetta catches at her throat. Let me repeat: my father

Is dying in a semi-detached house on a main road

Twenty miles off in the country. The skull is visible.

I do not want it to end. How exquisitely moving is death,

The approach to it. The lovers sob. Soon they will be wrenched apart.

How romantic it all is. Her hand is a white moth

Fluttering against the coverlet of the bed. The bones

Of my father's hands poke through his dry skin.

His eyes look into a vacancy of space. He spits into a cup.

In a few moments now Violetta will give up the ghost;

The doctor, the maid, the tenor who does not love her, will sob.

Almost, our hearts will stop beating. How refreshed we have been.

My father's clothes, too large for his shrunken frame,

Make him look like a parcel. Ah! The plush curtains are opening.

The applause! The applause! It drowns out the ugly noise

Of my father's choking and spitting. The bright lights

Glitter far more than the hundred watt bulb at home.

Dear Violetta! How she enjoys the flowers, like wreaths,

Showered for her own death. She gathers them to her.

We have avoided the coffin. I think that my father

Would like a box of good plain beech, being a man

From Buckinghamshire, a man of the country, a man of the soil.

I have seen my father, who is fond of animals, kill a cat

That was old and in pain with a blow from the edge of his palm.

He buried it in the garden, but I cannot remember its name.