The Last Week With the Woman He Loved

She will only stay this night    
and then a week, a week, circa a week.  
   
Oh, what a week to the twenty years.  
The prick of the spindle and the falling asleep,  
watching her bask in the morning of her unconsciousness.  
Remembering that once the eyes would perk and a soul would leap from behind.  
   
He married her because of her tenacity.  
Now she lies,  
and she lies for a week.  
   
What to do about this ailment  
that parodies the preciousness of moment,  
the sudden sparkling of hair  
and lightly expressed notion in the face,  
so subtle, so subtle and yet,  
so gone as time grieves and delighteth not,  
but marches apathetic like Brutus to the Curia in the Tragedy of Consul Caesar?  
   
And if God be merciful, why would he be so merciless as to ascribe to the format of a Greco-Roman theatre  
and be bound to the five Acts,  
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy?  
   
Another sun and moon, and it has been three days.  
Only seven more days with his love,  
to hold her hand  
and sketch her picture,  
and archive her traits for when he'll never see them again.  
   
Doting pointed ears, as if she was a fairy that digressed from Wendy's disbelief.  
And though I spoke to these ears, the will was not enough.  
   
Along the fifth day, the red hair bow pin that she loves to death or after life makes a gypsy out of her dual textured braids.  
   
The night of the sixth day, the hour to be our last, they sat on a futon beneath the stars.  
She was so pale, or maybe fair. No, pale.  
And her skin was festering with purple spots.  
Her perfume couldn't mask the stench.  
   
He holds her hand and cries and feels no grip back.  
His week was done.  
The embalmment could only hide the symptoms of necrosis for one week.  
   
And sleeping there in her rotting chest, he finds comfort  
that just as he was able to keep her after she was gone, he can keep her in some nearby eternity  
at the very edge of time.  
   
This might be an epilogue,  
the story continued antecedent to the first Acts.  
   
Tomorrow he will bury her, and without his sketches, photography, and poems,  
probably forget her appearance, except in a dream, the cruelty of Father Time.  
But he has these things and will never forget her.  
Though he didn't see the coffin lowered past the painful burning of eyes full of tears,  
he knows where his late wife is and where she belongs, and where she goes after seven days of his denial while sleeping with a corpse.  
   
Somewhere inside, he figures. And if not that, then somewhere above.  
But a dead person never enters the ground.