This is the covenant: that you would
live in a thousand homes,
walk a thousand lands,
see a thousand skies,
be wreathed a thousand times in pilgrim’s blue,
be quenched a thousand fold by sorrows of love, parting.
Goodbyes are beginnings for them
but the end of you.
Now that you have lived
in more houses and held more names
then can be remembered,
You cannot see the way,
nor recall the faces that once made them home.
That is how we die,
a bundle of nerves and sinew,
flesh and bone,
held together in leather,
roughened by winter
and the sun and the lost love that once made us old.
It is the people who remember
that gave this heap of flesh a name;
without them we’re just protein.
How long do memories linger when we die?
The only memory was her last breath.
There she was, a heap, a name
disintegrating into protein,
held together in the red dress she wore for her dance recital that morning.
Her last thought was music.
She departed during the season when peach trees bloomed.
You watched her deflate,
heard the raspy escape of her last breath into air.
Watched the dark silhouette of the city rising.
No trace of her survived these wayward journeys.
Nor memories of those time together that paled into stories,
of spring, of summer. But death is a winter whore.
Not a single soul to remember.
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