The Part About Dying

As morning passes, I hang laundry. There is rhubarb to be chopped, a lake that needs looking at. Somewhere in its pillared shadows a trout waits, singular and intent. We are all hungry, and we are all being fed.

Later I check on the sunflowers, most of which are sprouting. Mend the fence - or try to - where three nights earlier the bears plowed through for compost. N. comes over to ask if he can borrow some shotgun shells "on account of the damn foxes working through my chickens." Food.

Food and sex. And beauty? I pray contentedly as I move through the day, stopping now and then to write poems. Mare's tails fill the sky, swallows trace their invisible sanskrit across it.

Last night's kisses were so tender I wondered could a touch be any lighter. The dog watched from my writing chair, waiting for a corner of the bed to open up. After we ate pumpkin seeds and talked about my recent doctor's visit. You don't like it when we get to the part about dying.

What I won't be able to write will not go unwritten. The early spinach leaves are muddy and sweet but gone. One accepts that grace is fluid and in motion. And what is holds us, and promises death is dead.