Kindness and Generosity

When death within a year or less

Approaches to near certainty

And becomes common knowledge, watch

For all the surprising kindness

That can blossom out of people,

Their startling generosity.

What possesses humanity

That pettiness can get a rest

For someone so undeserving?

Admit that at a minimum—

You are not, nor were you ever,

Deserving of the kindnesses

Shown to you once the news got out

That you were caught in a vortex

That could not be escaped without

Medicines not invented yet.

First, everyone’s in that vortex—

People love to remind themselves

No one gets out of life alive.

It’s just that you’re spinning fast now.

Second, when were you generous

And kind to the extent people

Are now being kind to you? Once,

On impulse, maybe twice? Perhaps,

If that. No one would mistake you,

No one should mistake you (you!)

For a paragon of goodness,

And until recently you were

Confident no one ever had.

And yet here people are, helping

To extraordinary degrees.

If you were planning a tombstone

(You aren’t), an honest epitaph

Would read, Here lies old-and-so,

Of whom nothing much comes to mind,

To whom people were truly kind.

Poetics of the Bifungite

You become increasingly
Interested in the gone parts
Of your ordinary life

You witness fast becoming
Collections of trace fossils—
The living that shaped them lost,

Lost without fossils themselves,
So only their tracks remain.
All preserved writing’s like that—

Whatever invertebrate
Soul wriggled itself through the clay,
That lived part left no substance,

At least not here. Here are trails
And hollows of those gone thoughts
That pressed up against language,

And although the written words
Are valuable and useful
And easily repurposed

As tools for the fresh thoughts found
Living in them and through them,
Opportunists, as thoughts are,

They’re never those first, lost thoughts.
Yes. Yes, that’s hard to accept.
Don’t you read for the ideas?

Isn’t most of what you know
Of people, of who they were,
Derived from their trace fossils?

It feels so. You know the gone
Parts were once alive, were parts
Of your life, of other lives.

But thoughts are too brief, too soft
To preserve themselves. Thoughts left
These tracks while thoughts lost themselves.

Do Cells Suffer When They Die?

Bizarre small sounds coming from
Your own stomach woke you up
In the middle of the night,

Just before the storms began.
At first you thought it was a mouse
Caught in a mousetrap in your bed,

Squeaking piteously in pain.
Then you realized there was no trap
Set anywhere, much less your bed.

Lightning flickered on your eyelids,
And you opened them. Your stomach
Was whimpering—not liquid sounds,

Not bubbling with gasses—crying
In a tiny voice to itself.
As you woke to this awareness,

You kept listening, and you asked
If these noises you’d never heard
From your insides in six decades

Should be considered surprising.
The cancer’s not in your stomach,
Yet, not that you know of, and yet

It’s around the vicinity,
Swashbuckling across the torso.
Maybe those were the dying cries

Of captured, burning settlements
Of citizen cells surrendered
To the marauding berserkers.

More lightning and the rain began.
Nothing much more ordinary
Than a late-summer thunderstorm

In the southwest’s monsoon season—
Nothing much more ordinary
Than an aging man with cancer.

The sad, shrill cries of the stomach
Sank to the back of consciousness
Like the news of people dying

Horrendously in other parts
Of the terribly human world.
Rain beat the window, and you slept.