I.
Today, the day when clouds are strewn rose and a famished yellow across the dawn,
today some people are dying and others are being born.
Some approach death:
awakening to dread and dressers
piled with crusty medicine bottles,
gummy, half-used tissues,
their dense, crowded rooms smelling of stale fabric,
musty closets filled with plaid shirts,
crumbling with a tame and gradual grief.
Others awaken in a mid-life box,
the mind straight-jacketed in routine,
thoughts rubbery—
mechanical, lamenting thoughts laid in tracks
where tired locomotives have traveled,
worn paths in coal yards,
diminished, vapid,
stripped to their barest elements—
steel and ash and lifelessness.
And still others greet this day, awakening fresh with light souls and watch the swirling trees with ripe anticipation, with fevered mystery, with green childishness, with awe so close to their surfaces.
II.
At life’s end will we remember our forgotten dreams? Will their faded colors suddenly brighten, their whimsical textures solidify? And a lifetime of regrets — a collection of stones on a river’s bed, slick and sinking, dropping deep in the pits of our bodies — Will they disintegrate? Evaporate? Will they remain when we have been washed away? Will we remember the absence of love?
III. I collect words with the intention of learning their names. They sit there in my room in a box, unfamiliar. In a corner, neglected. Maybe I will go all my life without knowing their meaning, and they will turn stale like an old person who repeats to himself the same tired story.
IV. If I had known I would die in April, would the irony be too much to bear? In this season of birth and bursting, conception and crickets, growth and sweet-bleating lambs, of cherry blossoms and wisteria, all the while knowing that my life diminishes, that I will soon cease to exist? If I had known that the chatter of the living would continue without me, that my houseplant would outlive me. That mundane objects — a book, a pillow, a chair, a mattress — these artifacts that populated my life: I was their manipulator, their king. They served me. Instead they remain here, in the house that once contained my body and now throbs with my absence. They will live on, without master, without purpose. My clothes: the flowery blouse that itched me near the armpit, the skirt that made me look bloated, the black dress that complemented my figure, they will abide in my closet, not forlorn. And the brush that nests tangled strands of my hair. How thoroughly odd. That the world continues while I am no longer in it. My mirror does not mourn my reflection. That politics and celebrities and news, and jokes and television series, and commercials and brand marketing, and coffee mugs and key chains, and the knickknacks that gather dust on my shelf, they just continue, cruelly. My mind has knowledge of London, Rome, Istanbul, India, Japan, Antarctica. I know these places exist, but my body will never go there. It will soon be in the ground. It is dust, it is ash, it is meat and flesh and humus. Is there comfort in the knowledge that it may one day feed the roots of a tree? Or become a flower?
And what of my dreams unlived, my regrets accumulated? My loves abandoned?
V.
On the day after your death, the sun will rise in timid paleness, then, warming to the earth, will turn a buttery golden as the afternoon droops toward evening. And the doe will drink at the waters of the cool, black creek. The night after your death, the moon will emerge, icy and silver. Crickets will purr and bats will chase mosquitos in zigzags across the dusky skyline. And so it will continue. People will raise their voices, singing. Music will be made. The song will go on.
Painting by Egon Schiele