Gerald Fleming: On Ascension Thursday

Those tolling bells awake me: Ah: Ascension Thursday. 

            Not a bad way to go, given the alternatives. They said he was dead already, body somehow leapt from the tomb, appeared to his friends, said a few things, slowly rose.

            For us stuck down here it’s fear of cold, fear of fire. My friend Tim says he once visited a crematorium to see how it was done. The bones don’t come out in the neat little chunks they give you in that little box, Jerry, he said. First they put you on a conveyor, draw you into the fire, the moisture evaporates fast, you’re at 980 Celsius, muscle & flesh vaporize to ash, but the big bones still big bones—fibia, tibia, skull—and they’ve gotta grind them, a machine they call a cremulator, but sometimes it’s done by hand, guys out back, bonesmiths at an anvil, sledges & buckets. So that’s what you’ve got—dry calcium phosphates, a few metal fillings, you’ve got salts, but mostly it’s ground-up bones. That’s what you get in the little box.

            Great. Fire, then a grinder. 

            But burial, not much better. If you go down in a bigger box, sure, you’re dead, mere matter, but think of your poor flesh & bones—love the freedom of the streets, great strides in the open hills, sea sand under feet, the thighs tremendous bicycles, the belly on fire with freedom, your throat a great chimney, all of it now sealed in there, the lid screwed down for safekeeping, but soon it’s winter, water come a-seeping, and oh, water makes its way through wood, doesn’t it, and termites, too, and in who-knows-how-long you’re half-floating in the flatboat of your last bed, the P.R. firms of worms advertising Fête de Tête, Baccanal Cervical, Festine de Poitrine, and you can’t get out. Can’t. Get. Out.

            Not much other choice for us. Mass graves, I guess, or evaporated in some aeronautic mess, but we don’t think on that—better to consider ascension.

            Formula seems this. Young prodigy. Has a way with words. Brings someone out of a coma. Preaches peace, rages against bankers, tries his hand at carpentry, sexy woman loves him, meets his friends for dinner every week, they drink wine, talk, he says smart things, then, random as the rest of us, he’s killed.

            Gets to ascend to heaven.

            Now about heaven I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be good for the body to be taken up like that, large scale, the scene no longer spectacle? Dressed in the clothes you liked most, feet on a rising cloud, warm down here then colder, frozen stiff in the troposphere, rising into stratosphere and warming, but still stiff—now it’s mesosphere, you’re among the shooting stars & go still colder, then thermosphere, & though you’re dead, can’t see the auroras, there they are, my friend, as foot by foot you rise & heat & boil to vaporize & your molecules break apart, orphaned electrons floating free. By the time you reach the exosphere you’re gone. All this in a vertical rise shorter than the drive from Cincy to Philly.

            I’d like to go that way; God knew how to bring that boy home: not sopped in rank loam or cooked then crushed in a cremulator but making his way past spheres, elevated, freeze-dried, mummified, fired, each mashed molecule exo-sent, the whole of him elevated to management.

Copyright 2024 Gerald Fleming.

Gerald Fleming’s collections of poetry include The Bastard and the Bishop (Hanging Loose Press, 2021)