Vanitas by Richie Hofmann

Vanitas

In my dream about death, I come upon a hill,

silhouetted, and draw back behind the darkening

of a sheltered niche. There, upright in rows

of wooden chairs, the dead, their bodies still,

stare forward like children at school. Sitting

near the front, a teacher I’d once had, in a pose

from a Puritan portrait: his hair cropped,

conservative, in strands the color of ash;

his hands are folded loosely in his lap.

The surviving sun polishes a map

of light upon the grass, the sky unlashed

like leaves. Another flash drops,

brindled, across his face. He does not look

at me, but unfolds his hands and tugs gently

at my sleeve, confesses no one can remit

his crimes—mine also; that death, as from a book,

had torn the pages of years; that this memento mori

was not his life as he had left it.