James McMichael
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Life Says
If you’re awake to know
you’re being made dead
and then you are,
that may well have been that.
Having had your days and exited,
it can’t matter
how long your fathoming nothing then goes on.
How long you’d fathomed it before you were,
that hasn’t mattered.
Out of the nothing it had been before you
you plot as a fare-thee-well
how you won’t be
as soon as back to stay is when you weren’t.
An extant
item’s required
if time’s to bathe it,
space to close it round.
Thinking back
farther than you can to
time-space, from
space back then
time hadn’t fissured,
their two-as-one was the only.
With nothing stopping it,
demure,
through that whole reach time didn’t start in
until I,
Life, got to be decided for, and so Death too.
2
It’s been caused that I’m
innermost for any seedling.
Each keeps meeting its one
fit with me there while,
around us to the outside
where all plants grow,
extendedness happens. See?
Space.
Infinitely
too big to fit
without it
are the
(how many?)
blood-rich
spaced
parts that are you.
In the space
your exit from
me happens,
infinitely too
big you’ll be
3
Owed to Death always
is that I be called away to it
from anything I’m in
whenever, since,
indissolubly with Death,
I’m inside that thing non-stop.
Persons of course don’t,
but if instead of
dying them, you
lived your exterminations,
then we, Death and I,
we’d be twinned even more.
So God-foreign a
two we’d be that after
time together in each body,
the more perduring
second of us, one by one,
would hurry
back to the One,
for good, all plural things,
and I might be allowed along.
All of them, though, of course,
they’re at the last, in truth, all
Death’s to be done with.
I fail my cherished lost.