It’s not far to the ocean, not far
to the sky. Here are some guesses
about what happens when you die.
Maybe you wake in a room washed with light,
a frightened kid again or a bug, maybe
blocking the entrance a coyote-headed god
you’ll have to fight. The 18th c. chemist
Humphry Davy purposed souls jump
to planets of further and further remove,
Uranus most recently being found.
He died being cared for by an inn maid
he swore he met many years before
in a fever dream. Others seeking
re-animation hit-wired cadavers
inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
whose monster, lacking a soul, might
take forever to die, rotting slow on an iceberg,
obviously a critique of empiricism
and an awful way to go. Most of us would
rather quick, snuffed out instead
of wick guttering in a puddle of tallow
but please not yet. For the Greeks, the dead
knew the future and past just not the diff.
Chilling when Tiresias first greets
Odysseus on his fact-finding trip
to the underworld with You again?
Achilles tells us it’s no fun to be done
with even the muck of this world,
its gravel of dump truck palaver.
So much for the purity of the afterlife?
Freed of clogged drains, brain aches,
loud creeps on cell phones for what?
Hosannas of clouds? A warm, innocent
glow like peeing yourself in a swimming pool?
Maybe dark just thunks down on you, no
applause, no curtain calls. Who
meets you, who says your name?
Or does nothing make its sound?