Inscription for a Gravestone

 

.

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: 
That is to say, 
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, 
But not as a man 
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete 
Stripping for the race. 

The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer 
Of certain fictions 
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain 
And expand with pleasure; 
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope: 
That’s gone, it is true; 
(I never miss it; if the universe does, 
How easily replaced!) 

But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free. 
I admired the beauty 
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty. 
I wander in the air,

Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean; 
Touch you and Asia 
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises 
And the glow of this grass. 
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth 
For a love-token.


—Robinson Jeffers

 

 

.