After the biopsy, after the bone scan, after the consult and the crying, for a few hours no one could find them, not even my sister, because it turns out they’d gone to the movies. Something tragic was playing, something epic, and so they went to the comedy with their popcorn and their cokes, the old wife whispering everything twice, the old husband cupping a palm to his ear, as the late sun lit up an orchard behind the strip mall, and they sat in the dark holding hands.—Patrick Phillips
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the heaves of storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –And Breaths were gathering firmFor that last onset – when the KingBe witnessed – in the room –I willed my Keepsakes – Signed awayWhat portion of me beAssignable – and then it wasThere interposed a Fly –With Blue-uncertain stumbling Buzz –Between the light – and me –And then the Windows failed – and thenI could not see to see –
–Emily Dickinson
As for life,
I'm humbled,
I'm without words
sufficient to sayhow it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatchedthough warm and watched over
by something I have never seen -
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.
Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort -
along with human love,dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think aboutstopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?
–Mary Oliver
There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.
–Kevin Brockmeier
I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars' gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones:
so I look and reflect, but the air's glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:
no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
–A. R. Ammons
That man’s life is but a dream -
is what we now come to know.
Its house abandoned,
the garden has become home
to butterflies.
—Monk Sougi
Once I thought everything
has a soul
Then I learnt only
the fool fears the tree—
It is empty—
So too the wind
that sends it which
way and that—
Now I know God
is such a wind
from which we
are rent—
The heavens take
the tree
from the tree—
leaf by leaf—
Being gone, taken,
is what means Heaven—
It is full—of wings—
A music of what
is missing
since nothing
but men have souls
tho, it appears,
not many.
–Kevin Young
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets, the moon sets.
But they are not gone.
–Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
