In Paradisum, By Thomas Lynch

Sometimes I look into the eyes of corpses.

They are like mirrors broken, frozen pools

or empty tabernacles, doors left open,

vacant and agape; like votives cooling,

motionless as stone in their cold focus.

As if they’d seen something. As if it all

came clear to them, at long last, in that last moment

of light perpetual or else the black

abyss of requiems and nothingness.

Only the dead know what the vision is,

beholding which they wholly faint away

amid their plenary indulgences.

In Paradisum, deducan te we pray:

this first sight of what is or what isn’t.

From “Still Life in Milford” by Thomas Lynch (W.W. Norton: forthcoming in September)