More on: death

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…

Lord, here I am again at the graveyard where I’ll be buried, but for now where I rest before walking back home. I like to lie with my back on the grass and study the clouds, a Constable imposter, or sit on my gravesite and look at this little village— the cemetery, seven old houses…

I strive to live as if I were going to die tomorrow. The steady breathing of my sleeping wife, the taste of gherkin, the odor of soil and of dill, of smoke suspended over the fields, the sight of a couple necking on the dunes —that’s too much. They say that every day brings us…

Religion is a gesture of overt metaphor. Literature mostly accidental metaphors the writer meant as gestures. Moments presupposed to be meaningful rarely are. Attention is the fourth wheel on a grocery cart, where the grocery cart is your mind and attention the one wheel not always touching, but it can swivel in its bearings and…

What good is fighting now? You’re dying. Light will greet you wherever you go. Or it will not. Go gentle into that good night. Why rage against your sleep another night with fists that won’t unclench the twisted sheet? What good is fighting now? Your dying light shines its blossom of sharpened bones. Your plight,…

The view from the west-facing window dwindled and gloamed. The flies continued to buzz, ________________________the mice never set a pad down. The flies continued to buzz. Who is the father of time, death or his arrogant brother?  

Everything solid Melts away The knot in the heart Laughter from the lips Waves come loose from the ocean Grind the shingle into gritty lines Every line is sea-scum and the cry of gulls The moon drags up water and the fluids of my body My veins—a red hammock beneath the moon I dream I…

Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…

If a winter storm had ever toppled the blue spruce that towered over the Tandem nursing home, you would not have asked how old the tree was and by that mean a good life had been long enough. You would not have said the tree would no longer suffer indignities and use that to erase…