Exacting Our Obeisance

It surely is a human fate –

one hard to tell from dread –
to know that we will walk in on
the dying and the dead:

family and friends and pets –
their sundry histories –
the passing of assumptions,
loves, and other mysteries –

perhaps it proves effectual
to render, by contrast,
a vivid sense of living from
a living sense of past;

provisional, that sense of dread –
and fleeting, as one sees
volcanically eruptive life
replacing, by degrees,

the whole of everything again,
distracting, with its kiss,
exacting our obeisance,

to soften what we miss.

.