Reading Donald Antrim’s Words

You read us like night nurses
Check on us. Are we breathing?
Have we found a way to live?
Have we found a way to die?

You can never be too sure.
Words are something like alive,
And meanings are that something.
We cling like fog to the glass,

And you have to ask yourselves,
Was that you, was that your breath?
Without us, bodies never
Try to die. They die fighting

For one more moment alive—
In the jaws of predators,
Hanging from the lips of cliffs,
In the grips of parasites,

In the thrall of small ideas
That crawl through the dark of night—
Have we found a way to live?
Have we learned the way to die?