will be a Saturday or a Tuesday, maybe.
A day with a weather forecast,
a high and a low. There will be news:
a scandal, a disaster, some good
deed. The mail will come. People
will walk their dogs.
The day I die will be a certain
day, a square on a calendar page
to be flipped up and pinned
at the end of the month. It may be August
or November; school will be out or in;
somebody will have to catch a plane.
There will be messages, bills to pay,
things left undone. It will be a day
like today, or tomorrow—a date
I might note with a reminder, an appointment,
or nothing at all.
“The Day I Die” by Krista Lukas, from Fans of My Unconscious. © Black Rock Press, 2013.
Isn’t it weird how we die and the world keeps on turning? I remember my mother saying that she and Dad were watching 60 Minutes. At the beginning of the program Dad was alive. At the end, he was dead. Just like that. (He was in very bad shape, in a hospital bed on the ground floor of their house). And the world kept on turning, even though he was now “on the wrong side of the grass.”
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And the world spins madly on…so true and so odd. And the 60 Minutes irony…,
Krista’s piece reminds me of a Merwin poem that Mished-Up introduced me to:
For the Anniversary of My Death
BY W. S. MERWIN
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by W. S. Merwin.
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