The Last Word

By Tom Sleigh b. 1953 Tom Sleigh

for Lem 

As if your half-witted tongue

Spoke with an eloquence

Death bestows, I heard your voice

Muffled through the dark

Layers of cemetery loam:

“They found me black-suited

In the shuttered half-dark, my eyes

Dug like claws into the clouds’

Soft feather-turnings. What kept me

Separate the broiling sun

Of intellect now shone on fiercely:

In the sheep-pens stinking

Of dung and lanolin,

I buried my face in the ewe’s

Swollen side and listened

For the lamb the way

The night sky listens

To the synapse-fire

Of meteors, the fibrillating

Heartbeat of the stars.

I heard the cells crackle

Into being, the embryonic

Brain begin to burn:

Hunger. Thirst. Beneath my ear

My own disastrous birthing,

The umbilicus strangling

Like a whip around my neck,

Shoved through the momentary

Breach memory tore open—

Dying revealed to me my birth,

How half my brain went dark,

One side of a universe

Pinched out like a candle:

Just smart enough to sense

My difference, yet not know why—

Even my death was the thrust

Of a bewildering punchline: On Thanksgiving

Morning mouthwatering

Pain shoved like a spit

From my bowels to my brain.”

Source: Waking (The University of Chicago Press, 1990)

Biography

Tom Sleigh is the author of more than half a dozen volumes of poetry. Space Walk (2007) won the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award and earned Sleigh considerable critical acclaim. Referring to this collection, poet Philip Levine noted, “Sleigh’s reviewers use words such as ‘adept,’ ‘elegant,’ and ‘classical.’ Reading his new book, I find all those terms beside the point, even though not one is inaccurate. I am struck by the human dramas . . .

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