Tag Archives: death

Just before the final extinction

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Just before the final extinction
There were strange and wonderful creatures
Elusive slabs of silver
Darting through the water
Among shape-shifting bulbs
Trailing fierce limbs
And some barely-there whisps
Still deadly with near visible
Strands of poison

And the stone-clasping tendrils
Living dually beneath and above
The frothing rock wacked about
By unseen surrounds

Miniscule bits buzzing through the air
But strong enough to pierce the
Thick outards of others
To suck their vital fluids
Long bendy tails with no body
Slinking among roots and shoots
A mouth at one end and nothing at the other
Lumbering bellowing lumps
With long tusks
That dazzled white in the pristine sunlight

Oddest of all, a bipartite creature
Split nearly symmetrical
Nearly similar but cruelly not
Moving by alternating stilts
Spindly and unbecoming
The two halves bound in eternal embrace
Clutching each other’s throat
Desperate to let go
But trapped, trapped by fear of succeeding

Snow, a haiku

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New snow
Cold and weightless
As yesterday’s ghosts

The meaning of life

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We live so that graveyards
May be full of forgotten worries
We strive so that our hopes and fears
Will lie with us as our essence
Bleeds into the indifferent clay
The bits and pieces of our living
Drift out into the vagrant air
To be reborn in the yet unguessed
Strivings of the yet unknown
Leaving some vague imprint
On the great entropic vastness

If you live long enough

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If you live long enough, you will see them die.
Longer still, and they fall like spring snow.
There are those who say grief is all second-hand,
That we grieve for ourselves alone
When those too like us prove mortal.

I suppose, for the first fierce blow,
That’s true: we stumble forward, gut-shot,
All death and bewilderment;
But after that? After the long parade begins in earnest?

True, a kind of acceptance sinks in,
A not-quite numbness, a sedation,
A shaking of the head, “Why,
Just yesterday…”

But there are ghosts.
They follow us everywhere,
And in some unguarded moment, a grief descends
Pure and sweet, almost holy,
And wholly devoid of self.

In these moments
We cradle our memories like children,
And all we long for
Is one more touch.

Songs

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Some songs are best as background:
Words unheard, rhythm only, harmony guessed,
Like a stray aroma, too vague to catch a grip
On a past long gone,
Like hawk-baiting wrens still thrashing
After the raptors have all gone home.

All the best birds will eat carrion, even prefer it
Leavened and tenderized, not like the fierce will
To hang together you get from raw muscle
Newly riven from the bone, still hoping
For a quickened heart to bring new blood,
Still pushing back at beak and claw.

I try to imagine the silent throat,
Its alarm stilled forever.