When the last lithe leopard
in the emperor's crowded preserve
leapt down from his arboreal perch
pink-mouthed and mottled,
where was the degenerated emperor,
taped and bandaged,
with all his skill for naught and
disowned by his own people,
slowly, grandly, greedily dying?
Nowhere else but
still as stone
in the hospital,
such as it was,
his golden skin wan
in the crepuscular hospital light.
Was it his own disease,
newly invented,
or whose disease was it?
Lengthy discourse
rattling out of the
discountenanced doctor,
made clear the cancer or
so he called it,
was the last stop on the line.
Brutish cells, voyaging
in giant argosies of destruction
turn yellow to sallow
and, dappled with deceit,
dangerous sympathetic
friends and courtiers
dimly seen, daily on view
became more distinct,
more sovereign,
as death clumped closer
and the flesh, forever awake,
became a burden.
Death as a unicorn
in nurse's uniform
bides his time,
patient as Griselda
among bottles and needles.
Toward the last morning,
fading with the stars
the Yellow Emperor saw clear
as alpine forests, close as lovers
the luminous jade-green eyes
of a dragon, watchful and quiet,
watched it fade
to its beautiful oblivion of myth
and the emperor arose,
a live wire of life and strength,
leaving cap and clothes,
leaping through the dawn
he went, bright as the Paschal lamb
he went, bright as the morning he went,
dancing to the harmony and peace
of nothing at all,
to eternal heavenly equivalence;
kingpin of the indeterminate,
internal joyful void
where all power and life begin.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.