When who he once was comes back up to the surface,
he wonders why he is still here. A practical man,
he knows the truth: none of this works anymore.
He knows the burden he has become, but forgets
each idea as it expires. Names are gone, time
passes no posted markers as it marches along,
and sleep is now more than half of what life
has become. Faces arrive and go, unrecognized.
And when the fog lifts to reveal the crystal scene,
there is only one devout wish left: to be gone.
She keeps his body safe, fed, medicated
and put to bed. His voice, the same as it ever
was, his eyes still alive and reading her eyes,
the smile the same one she saw the day they met.
Now, it is sixty years later, and there is no sense
to any of this. We could consider how unfair
pain can be, how disease lurks in the hidden cavities
of marrow, in the surging blood, in the tissue
of the brain, how the parts wear themselves out
or how they just go bad or suddenly fail at last.
The problem now is kindness, the tenderness
born of seeing a man become a child once more,
nearing his infancy day by day, crawling back
into a womb as silent as stone, as deep as the earth,
as deep as all the time that has ever existed.
She labors on, no, she battles on, against the ending,
both his and hers, against the final entry to that place
unknown that has always been waiting for them.
