How I Would Like To Die
 

I would like to die like a photograph
with all its pixels pushed to take in
the aqua of the grass, the sere woods, sky.
And I would like to die like a wheelbarrow
I dragged up a road, trudging, its cargo lost,
the branches, dirt, that fill it
dumped in the mulch pile.
I would like to die joyous, healthy,
as if the tremulousness
of illness would not matter much.
And I would like to die before my friends,
with them waiting for me, writing me,
advising me, visiting me as if these things
could cushion me to a strange ending
to everything I have known,
captive now in the magnifying glass
of the past— 
to everything that has come before.
 
 


 
No one Can Discover the World for Someone Else
                                                                            --Wendell Berry
 
You read Agatha Christie mysteries,
I read Dostoevsky and Dickens,
yet when we came together
and heard guitar, you knew
the words to the songs, the strung-out,
helpless meaning. No one can
discover the world for someone else.
Some mornings I wake up almost blind,
and nothing is mapped for me.
It was that way when we were young,
the trees shivering with grief
in spring, because of the cold,
because they knew their blossoms
could not last forever. You told me
of your first car, your first accident,
moving here to be near your mother,
her dying, your meeting me.
Sometimes flutes trill like
birds in the songs we listen to,
the old songs. I cannot predict
what world you will discover
now we are separated. I look
at the muscles of trunks and branches
of trees. Sometimes lighting strikes
one of them, a tall oak, and
it falls across the trail,
I hear it, see what legacy is left,
the new wood, the branches like arms
that once took many birds.