MARIO

In life he was a friendly man,

Father Kevin said in his memoriam,

though estranged from his wife.

They found him the other morning

about eleven.  A fellow electrician

opened a fuse box, which like all else

in the hospital, was huge

and there he was.

Later his iron crucifix

caught the chaplain’s eye, he said.

His electrician mates

wore fresh white overalls to his service

for power is to be handled with respect,

surgery being not alone

in demanding cleanliness.

The hospital chapel

was sterilised of gods

that bleed and hang.

Instead macramé icons woven

from the string of human pity

damped the traffic noise

of heavy questions.

The organ wheezed

not with reeds and wind

but electricity: ‘It was a dreadful shock,’

the chaplain said,

a slip to Freud instead

of genuflect to Jesus.

Mario was leaning from his ladder

when he too slipped, and fell,

embraced his brief, bright,

terminal disease, metal lines

of spasm on his face: Amen.

There were no suggestions

of a heart attack

no suspicious circumstances

but it was an inauspicious place

for dust to settle.

A supervisor from the kitchen spoke

and tapped his warmth.

She’d thumbed a lift

to work with him that morning.

More to tell, I thought:

she read a poem at his vale.

‘Share a smile, now!’ she said.

‘No-one knows what’s coming!’

Little insulation here

against the volts –

not overalls, or paracletes,

or holy doves of string

or the thick gloves

of the administration.