ELEGY FOR TWO VOICES

I.

Dropped overboard, the dead follow in the wake,

nudging the hull in calm weather, slamming

their shrouded fists when the water roils;

or they sink and become part of the ocean,

points to cross and recross.

So it happens we all come trailing debris

into every harbor, folding our charts

marked where parts of the heart went down.

To live only in the breath of the moment,

the way an insect must or a bird,

driven by the hum of the instant of being,

nothing before or after the now

of hunger or the need to make a small music

in the one light, before the one dark,

is to be immortal.

Say it out loud: Knowledge is death.

Sometimes the old myths get it right-

the garden and the terrible self-awareness,

the first clock wound tight and running,

heard for the first time knocking at the ribs.

Death at the door.

And then the grief for everything

that does not know-a vicarious knowing

for the cricket and the wren.

2.

The dead are exceptional swimmers,

breasting the soil, riding the cresting hills.

Who else could hold so still in the tidal pull?

Dolphin-shimmer, a dream inside a dream

of drowning, and still our own hard breath

pulls us up, gaffed and gasping in our little boats,

the room holding a fading oceanic roar.

Only the duty of the moment matters

in the life unaware of how the moments gather,

only the loud fraction of self in the noise of a need,

oblivion of a garden sown with gravel,

the wayside seed filled with nothing

but its own potential to become what it already is,

a stony certainty in the field of eternity.

Whisper it to yourself: Death makes us love.

Knowing the end that binds us

is the price we pay to feel-

sweet wound in the midnight of our fear

when we turn to touch a shoulder,

to make our sorrow real, to remember our joy

in this life and the lives around us,

and in those swimmers we have not forgotten.