Because around you, the mortal world is always dying,
that banana you left behind at breakfast and that calf
you just saw mooing for its mother in the pasture.
Oh, vaccines and antibiotics and moisturizers can only hold
death at bay for so long, its breath on us a push towards the door.
Grab your coat, death says, get ready for adventure!
Let’s play a game in which no one ever dies,
all serene and ageless—a universe of unicorns, dynamic as glass,
impossible to impassion. After all, angels have no investment
in the living, in the dirty nature of breeding and birth,
in our grubby hands clutching at the soil from beginning to end,
as if to stay a little longer. You remember volunteering
in the Children’s Hospital ward, little faces as sunny and smiling
towards death as they were towards popsicles, or a new set of crayons,
while their parents looked on, afraid and weepy.
And anyway, is there any way really to prepare for that goodbye,
to send your body…elsewhere, to break down quietly? We can choose
to time our sorrow. I believe in today, this apple that isn’t quite ripe yet,
this poem that isn’t finished, a bed rumpled with my husband’s still
sleeping form, my lungs still breathing, my fingers still on this page
