Seven Eulogies on the Death of a Hangman

1. Before he died, he wrote in his journal of things that, like his journal, did not exist, "The sandwich shop's sound system plays a hammered dulcimer recording of 'Love Me Tender.' I poach its wifi hotspot to read a middlebrow review lauding a YA fantasy author who launched her remunerative fairy series via an audacious Kickstarter campaign with simultaneous web publication. In my fairy world, I've been generating a fresh poem a day for two thousand and some days, also littering the web, or a tiny cross-stitch of it, with my flies, but with no coherent narrative and no fundraising campaign to attract attention to them. My accolades thus far include scattered compliments, quite too many."

2.  Oceanic and wickedly perceptive, whirlpools disappear suddenly and even the smoke of cigars loses its elaborating beauty as it diffuses into haze. Thom Yorke's implausibly pure, floating legato unspools as an effortless syllable of cry, burning the witch. Hunger. Time. Sex. Breath. Dying. Not death. Death has no desires. Death isn't part of it. Death is the not of it, nothing, and nothing was his sworn occupation. Who could he possibly be parodying among the dying, even including himself, puff of smoke, dissipating?

3. Freud dreamed he was landing at Pevensey. If a grazer ate the brain, it would mean death. I have three weeks or so to live, he told me, and I knew he meant me as well as himself. Riley Lee then played an interchangeable flute piece with the interesting sobriquet, "Whispers of Eternity." Now, if eternity were a thing with whispers, what would those whispers be? Stage whispers, I should think, hissed from under a villain's handlebar mustache. Sometimes an eternity is just an eternity. What panache. It's not something we have to worry about, as a practical matter, but it's there.

4. When is prizewinning prose implode-worthy poetry? When it's implausibly prosody. There's that word again, penultimatum. Nothing is. Impossible, never, but implausible eternally. Divide infinity in half, again and again and again, infinitely. That's reality.

5. He loved his living. He was a craftsman about dividing the moment from the never as minimally as possible. I'm sorry he's gone. He was only a ripple in the waves, but he was the best little ripple he could be. When the moment came, it was already gone forever, thanks to him. I'm sorry he never existed and neither did the lake. Oh, sure, it was a breeze.

6. He was the last person thought to have read all the writings ever written, also the first. He must have been. He wrote it first. Nearly two centuries gone, Hippolyte Bayard used light to etch a kind of photo of himself as a print that he titled "Self Portrait of a Drowned Man." The image survives. For Hippolyte it never was. Nor were any of the hundreds of millions of people, global total of those born in the sixty years after he made his print, every last one of them gone now but maybe one, world's oldest person, woman in Brooklyn or Italy, taken away from him, each other, and themselves forever by his self-same hangman and soon enough never nothing to themselves even before that. Never will be, either. He was just that efficient, wasn't he? He wasn't, was he.

7. What haunts us is that he can't haunt us.