A Note from When I Was Here to Anyone Here

April 19. Sunday. Uncommonly warm.
The Times details signs of the coming collapse,
tells of a generation of casual killers
making its way past puberty in small towns,
of lakes and rivers all the fish are gone from,
reports the prayers of women with covered faces
who beg for the end of war, the return of their sons,
and gives the financial news with ingenious graphs.

It also invites subscriptions, which we can take
as an act of faith in delay, in possibly not.

If you are there, are here, and you can read this,
mostly we hoped you would be, mostly we do,
and there were some who tried to make that likely,
though not me much, nor many that I knew.

The Old Professor Deals with Death and Dying

Talking around the block with no one near
but me, my sometime friend,
I think of events that punctuate our lives
and how, as a kindness deep in the nature of things,
death brings the sentence to an end.

How many of us, though,
when vessels break and minds misconstrue,
will say inside ourselves that we'd rather be dead
except that we're scared to die?
More than a few,
hardly disturbing the bedsheets, have said—
telling not quite the truth, not quite a lie—
"Lord, I don't want to die. I just want to be dead."

They'd leave living behind and go back to what
they were before they were born. Who can recall
a lot of discomfort in that? Like as not,
we're all of us going to no place at all,
a nowhere with nothing to pay, nothing to do,
no one to do it with and no one to care.
What a crock to have to suffer through
a damned initiation to get only there.

Still we stand at the beds of those who leave us
and cherish the seconds. Still our best dramas
depend on the death scenes, which all the religious
tell us are not periods but commas.