Gradually, under the spell of gravity,
I’m changing
back into a handful of dust,
a handful, moreover, I borrowed.

I step out of the shower and look into the mirror,
and I have to laugh.
Still, there’s the human glue of touch,
the not-yet-joke of sex.

I’m only passing through, is how
the old hymn puts it, which my late aunt, Irma,
sang in the Springside Baptist Church, in gull falsetto,
with peacock gusto, and I, barely a fledgling, roared inside.

But the art of aging, which is the art of failing,
which is the art of losing, which is the art of accepting,
is hard to master, let alone, graciously.

I wake at 2AM and become my own bully:
fool, coward, failure, you could have done more with your life,
and before I imagine a bullet tearing through my cranium,
I silently recite Psalm 23.

Beside me, Deb is sleeping, softly breathing.
She is my true comfort. Yet, not always comfort enough.

We are living and dying at once.
I know this! I’ve said it in conversation when I was the age of my children.
Now, how comically different it sounds.

This strange spiral of years, like a towering tin trophy, teetering,
and I, scavenge the hours for pauses, to shore up its brittle pedestal.

And now I see my mother — smiling, amused by my youthful naivety.
Almost 92, she died full of grace,
happily content, as though eating cherries.

My father, who died at 73, liked to say, “young at heart,”
and I liked to hear him say it, right up until that surprising day.

At the cusp of my seventh decade, I’m learning to accept my death,
and wondering if I’ll see my aunt again. I’d love to hear her sing.
Then we’d get down to some gossip, over a cup of Postum.

Mom will be making sandwiches, homemade butter on homemade bread.
Dad, at the kitchen table, will be tilting back in his chrome-frame,
blue-vinyl chair, wearing two holes in the linoleum,
reading the Yorkton Enterprise.

I’ve read the science. Our collections of atoms, scattered, repurposed,
going on and on; but I’m not happy about the thought of atomizing.
Give me an afterlife, but with real fried bologna.

So just this morning, at Country Grocers, someone touched my arm,
and I melted, and I burned
to remain here, here, on this blue, blue, earth.

Faces blaze white then fade. Angels weep.
A shell has fallen on a graveyard.
A grandmother and grandfather are wandering through ruins
like spectres. The dust will never settle.
Rockets have arrived and have taken out the streets.
All the dogs and cats have left, and the ones that couldn’t
are trapped and yowling in pain and confusion.
When a missile hit the side of a hospital, four girls died,
along with an expectant mother and the would-be father;
also a brother and two cousins, one who was visiting
from a city, 100 kilometers away, and one who had been talking
on the phone to his partner, who is living in Montreal.
A friend, even further away, in Whitehorse, is driving to work
to welcome an international group of environmental scientists,
he too is looking forward to hearing news of the birth.
In a Boeing 787, flying at 40,000 feet, a sister of the once-expectant
mother is reading Ken Follett’s new novel, Armor of Light.
She has planned a surprise visit. In the universal circle above that,
lifeless wails, torrid shrieks, factional curses, are rising,
along with the cries of orphans and the burnt ghosts of infants
and parents and siblings and so on, and the escaping spirits
of trees and animals, and the grief of homes and schools,
and the dying memories of ice cream trucks, playgrounds,
waterparks, and tricycles, and among the inconsolable prayers,
tentatively, Dear God, help us see our children in their children,
and their children in our own.