Memento Mori

It could have been any necropolis—The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Douaumont Cemetery, or Ursula in Cologne—but it was the Ossuary in Naples that never left me.

Maybe it was the endless rows of skulls on cliff shelves, cave cupboards stacked with craniums, temples and mandibles, rock puppet heads pocked with craters marking absences.

Only the stone scaffolding remained behind this landscape of missing visages,
sockets that once had cradled eyes like egg cups, now empty caverns.

Twin heart-shaped black hollows where noses were, as if they’d been snapped off
like corn stalks leaving nostril grottoes.

The sight derailed me from my endless doing, halted all my schemes—modest and elaborate—
for living. As if a lion had entered the room and lay down in front of me to keep me honest.

Then came the litany of whys: “Why wash,” I asked myself? “Why store beans in airtight canisters? Why work? Why sing? Why iron shirts. Why make a child? Why cry? Why learn or yearn?”

If the skulls had flinched like a line of pigeons pecking lice, I’d have cited the unflinching evidence of life like a good scientist, then lumbered on, head bent, intent again on primacy.

If the skulls were coconuts stockpiled in a pantry, I could plan to eat one each day, my careful rationing sworn to purpose.

Or, if the skulls had come with faces stretched over them like bright canvases, a caption
might read: “1955 Amalfi Coast (from L to R) Uncle Pietro, Alice, Dominique and Thibault.”

But all was static in the ossuary cave, except for my lion whose chest gently rose and fell
among the bone-heap of whys.

This is you, the mouthless said.
And I saw my own anonymous bone among the plural dead.