Signs of Death Urged
Headline in the Greenfield, Massachusetts, Recorder
When you are nearing death,
love, please give me a sign:
a semaphore flag
or yellow leaves falling all around us
or a stapler run out of staples,
everything flying apart.
Skywriting would do:
Surrender Dorothy.
Or my own body shrinking,
desiccating, becoming
redundant. Please, help me see.
Something extravagant
would also suffice:
a bonfire of our lives
together – Paris and the neon signs
of Farmington, New Mexico.
And don’t forget our wooden
Dorchester triple decker –
that would burn too fast
and so deliciously –
all the lead paint, the woodwork,
the weak porches, all our sex,
all our growing up.
Of course our fights could go:
your fist through the door
and my silence, too.
Fire loves that kind of rage
and the meetings, the phone calls,
all the ways we tried to change
this bleeding world.
Give me a sign.
Trees and their blooming glory,
lilac – the way it grips us,
shakes us, sends us reeling
so we forget – this life,
what we thought we meant.