Present State of the Wreckage

There is no pretty way to die.
But let’s not make a dirge of it.
The galvanizing urge that governs
comfortable sentience is remarkably

resourceful: weaves right to and through
the tiniest of breathing threads.
My father’s gaze retained a hazily alluring
light throughout his last act of dementia

which quite put the lie to it: soft flicker
in a puppy’s eye, too full of ingenuity
and yearning to mistake for anything
but something living, burning, still

determined: turning in the heavens
like a glowing sphere. He was,
I have to think, still ‘here,’ beyond
the point of knowing it through

calculable evidence. I roll and nap
and moan a little, like an old hound
dog: April sun arrives: connives
with me to rise. I bumble toward

this opportunity to stir: get up,
and take three Advil with a maple
yogurt drink. (Another poem blinks
obliquely at my mouth.) Pain, like death,

is the defining thing: like North suggests
a South, a dark against which one
might bring a sharper sense of sense.
My dense slow doggy body

and its mild strained distress allows,
I guess, a point of view. How much
rubble do I see from it? Popping like
a bubble, conscious life is far less

tethered to the wreckage than I vacantly
imagined it would be when I was
twenty. Now, with all its mottled wide
variety of shadow, is my plenty.


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