Mortal Choices Poem by Pamela Spiro Wagner

Off the corridor plumed with oxygen
the blue incandescent symmetry of your tiger
burns blue behind every door,
consumes and is consumed
in pyrotechnics cold as starlight.
Hope, guttering like spent Christmas,
in votive lights it candles visible death:
the mirror measures each breath,
telegraphing the code.

Your Morse is all dots now, brief impossibilities
that punctuate the smallness of what’s left:
a perfect absolution, the crime
wounding your Biblical angel
on the banks of the river, flames,
those last lives
devouring the bridge to any other shore,
the last sufficient silos of breath
begging the grail of your life...

Here, then, is that chalice, beautiful and terrifying
that overflows and is refilled endlessly.
Ambivalent, you drain it in isolation
the stupefying liquid fire,
its beatitude scarring you, marking you
as death wakens to its task:
your perfection, cold and final as snow.