Today's poem in honor of the late Maxine Kumin

Death, Etc.

I have lived my whole life with death, said William Maxwell,

aetat 91, and haven't we all. Amen to that.

It's all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better

for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.

I'm not being gloomy, this bright September

when everything around me shines with being:

hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,

puffballs humping up out of the forest duff

and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth

bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,

to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us

night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.

Nevertheless, what Maxwell said speaks to my body's core,

this old body I trouble to keep up the way

I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent

on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,

spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs

out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly

while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given

to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,

to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict

which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate

the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.

Which of us will go down first is also not given,

a subject that hangs unspoken between us

as with Oedipus, who begs Jocasta not to inquire further.

Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,

to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,

he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.

A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.

We have put behind us the State Department tour

of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly

as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.

We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,

narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.

We have travelled by Tube and Metro o'er the realms of gold

paid obeisance to the Wingèd Victory and the dreaded Tower,

but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles

in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.

Every August when the family gathers, we pose

under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,

the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum

that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood

the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,

its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing

out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still

and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middleaged children,

the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair

of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers

compared to our own. We try to live gracefully

and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward

stumbling, afraid of the dark,

of the cold, and of the great overwhelming

loneliness of being last.

Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 - February 6, 2014)
Where I Live

New and Selected Poems 1990-2010