everyone after Darwin
celebrated the rhythms
glacial extinctions
(making the bad news good)
imagine: the world’s way older
than the Bible says it is
we evolved from apes
religion took a dive
in the late 19th century
replaced by spiritualism
ghost-tracking, clairvoyants
mediums, Madame Blavatsky-types
novel efforts to reach the dead
is in denial about mortality
How could this be it?
extinction, terror
except the lucky few
who still believe in an afterlife
competing versions abound:
gauzy angels with harps
floating on cottony clouds
empyreal thrones
or cryonically-frozen fools waiting
for medical advance to wake them up
reincarnation
(better a butterfly than a cockroach)
the rest of us
live in denial
in the busy buzz of our being
until the doctor says
to the middle class with decent medical care
we’ve done everything we can
a new space, enormous, tidal
but tiny
between denial and death
breaks through, opening up
a new knowing, definitive
what you sort of already knew
unblinkered watching months of decline
slow wasting, exhaustion
swallows you
churns your blood with anxiety
like Jonah, you’re in the whale
now you have to live
in that space between
knowing
and dying
after there’s nothing they can do
but still wanting to go
as full tilt as possible
there’s living to do
until there isn’t, no?
Dion Farquhar has recent poems in Clackamas Literary Review, New Words Press, Black Fox Review, Non-Binary Review, Superpresent, Blind Field, Poesis, Mortar, Local Nomad, Columbia Poetry Review, moria, Shifter, BlazeVOX, etc. Finishing Line Press published her third poetry book, Don’t Bother, last fall, and she has three chapbooks.
