No Containing You

When you’ve got no more bucket,
Worry less about your lists.

How exciting it’ll be
To be beyond all haunting—

That is, instead of being
Haunted to do the haunting.

Watching other people go
Makes people indulge the strange

Notion that the gone person
Will come to the point of view

Of long solitariness,
Not of nada’s new freedoms

But of something like exile
Or prolonged prison sentence,

A heroic misreading
Made possible by longing—

Also, oddly, by the trap,
Also, oddly, by the fact

That people live in the trap
Of story, of narrative,

That closes when the buckets
Are revealed nonexistent,

Like a variant version
Of Sorceror’s Apprentice,

Nothing enchanted, nothing
To clean the floors with at all.