Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Found: On Death


Ben is dead.


With 50 pages left, Ben is dead. The shadow-god of Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, has died of pheumonia. The death scene with family encircled has moved me deeply.

Thoughts, naturally, of my own brood, my own memories to be.

How will I mourn? In bedside vigilance of prayer? Cornered

howls for everything that was not?

An how will others encounter themselves

in my passing?


What thoughts, once seeking me out to play,

will flicker off for some other diamond,

another hardened stone in which to see their own in a perfectly

broken brilliance? Will they cry for the one left behind, the strange refrain

that had no more worlds?


Without even trying

I turn it to me.


What egoism arises

from death.


to my brother, found in old journal

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