Wonderments

Our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot 
be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily 
haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration. 
                                                                              —Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

A day of quiet wonder in my hands 
holding nothing but bewilderment 
at the green world knocking on my window— 
I am alive! fresh from harrowing 
my address book, a kind of columbarium 
page-after-page, of the too-soon- 
too-many-dead. Bob, heart attack, 
at fifty-five, Amelia, throat cancer, sixty, 
Jane, double-vaccinated, Covid, seventy, 
all of them here, then a moment, suddenly—

suddenly, even the long death of my mother 
I watched, while I sat beside her 
weeks, with the hospice nurse, dazed, 
then suddenly, her eyes glazed over, 
a yellow glare of translucent cellophane 
all her gaze, transfixed on mine 
as if she’d seen enough of me for a while—

In a minute now I will go out 
into the terrible gift of the sun 
just one of my unaccountable, unasked fors—

If I disbelieved in coincidence, 
which I do not, I might think it coincidental, 
not heaven-sent that this is the first 
day of Spring and this afternoon 
I will need to buy a new, gold-embossed 
leather-bound address book, 
if they still sell such antiquities, 
one which will outlast my being here.

In the life to come,  I believe 
I will look back on this, look down on this, 
wondering while I was here 
how long I thought I might need 
that address book, its inchoate, 
un-fingered, immaculate, sheer white pages—