Coming to Terms

Life is mostly messy.

Summer giving way to

autumn giving way to

winter, it does not let

us go easily, these

seasons sticky with the

wrapping and entrapping,

with indignities of

failing flesh and worse,

the fading perceptions

and personalities.


Tears have never slowed this

deep rooted entropy

breaking those whom I have

loved and love still,

an anticipated

wrongness of lingering,

the final certainty.

.

Somewhere, between grieving

for what I knew and lost

and fear of what I know

and yet have not met face

to face, lies this: when time’s

time is up, I want to

see it coming, grasping

the final antics of

brain, of bone, of spirit;


Clear-sighted. I’ve always

had one hand on that door,

one eye’s wink from darkness

into light, a wing beat

from falling, into flight,

one joyous leap into

the laughing eternal’s

loving arms. It is not

death I fear but dying.