At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday
and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable
longing to be both the same and other.
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Storms tore down a city’s worth of leaves last night,
and now I’m up to my shins in a litter of green corpses.
A hundred thousand of them, more, ripped untimely
from their branches. I shuffle through the layers of them,
vivid with the wasted stuff of photosynthesis,
still primed to drink the sun.
How long before they know in their cells it’s over?
I’ve read that lab rats dropped in cylinders of water
will tread only briefly, then simply give it up, go under.
But feed those rats on yogurt, they’ll paddle to exhaustion,
their resignation overruled by resident bacteria
refusing to jump ship: a legion of stubborn otherness.
All this year, I’ve lived entangled in the vying mandates
of this world. My mother says she’s ready now to go.
Am I wrong, then, if my heart insists not yet, not yet—
opposing my need to her willingness? These days,
hospice counsels us to hold a loved one’s lifeless hand
until the last cell cools.
Hearing this, I hurt for past abandonments,
hands released too soon to the ministry of creatures
whose own directive is to break flesh back
to its elements—
none of which was ever love.
The world feels alien this morning, the shine of the living
piled lifeless at my feet like suppliants:
I have not lived well in the presence of my dead.
Today, it seems an insufficiency of love
to hold a hand for anything less than forever.
But once, there was another measure—
six pomegranate seeds, after which no quantity
of love could make the slightest difference: it was
a simpler age. Three times, I’ve gone on with it, my life,
and now, again. Daily, I hold my mother’s hand,
knowing too much, too little. My life, like hers,
an otherness. However long.
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