I wake in the night—Abbas snoring,
The tick of the clock in the hallway,
A tinkle of distant bells—
There, out the window, the bubble
And oil of the moon, dripping on steps
To the terrace, on split bark and leaf,
Moon on my boat beached on the shore,
Whitened against the black sea.
What do I want in this still hour?
Should I put on my sandals and walk in the dunes?
Should I read, should I eat,
Spangled and slammed and confused?
So much is hidden,
And all doomed to waste away.
Hour by hour the taut wire slackens,
The sharp pull of memory, air and regret.
Something takes hold,
Grinning that terrible grin.
What will become of my flesh
When I’ve passed on to nothingness?
Atoms, my atoms, still bound
By the forces of physics
But free from their duties to life—
Where will they travel? Forgotten,
The sight of an island in haze, the explosion
Of starlings from trees, squeak of a door,
Darkness and light,
The procession of seasons—
Forgotten and lost from the bits of me,
Scattered in soil and in wind,
Drawn through the roots of a Chinese hibiscus
To sleep in its white sleeping petals.
Some washed to sea, swallowed by fluke
And blue marlin, some tossed in the air,
Inhaled and exhaled for centuries. Strangers
Unborn will then breathe in my atoms,
All of them there—
Lavoisier can count.
Where is the moment I wept for my mother?
Last sight of my children? The memory
Of poems and geometry?
Atom by atom still there, but not there.