I am ashamed to keep thinking of death
as a chute that connects to the garbage. I know
I should picture it more like the pneumatic tubes

at banks of the past: you put in your name
and your paper and up you go. I know a bank

should be the operative metaphor
for every facet of existence, every time. I’m sorry

I haven’t more regularly made reference
to a bank. When I fail to liken something to a bank,
that’s how I can tell I’m tired. That’s not me,

I assure everybody. That’s the long week talking. Time
for bed. Time for the window, the hectoring sky,

the streetlight bright as the bright saved people
see before they die, but I don’t die.

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore; 
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

Because I once chose death, I expend my days in
horror at the possibility of it
choosing me. There are comforts the living heave
onto the dying
to evince a defiant distance
from inevitability—that they were ready,
or there was reason—but don’t dare

say I went peacefully, willingly. Tell them
exhaustion took
over my will but that in my eyes
you saw no relief. That I pleaded to continue
and panicked in every trying terminal
breath. I have known intolerable pain but
at its end, I was alive, begging to begin again.

Make sure to explain that what I understood of
love was childishly intense and usually
disprovable. That I cried over a comma, confused
every skyline for another, did not believe any verse
could be blank. Don’t leave
out the walnut cracking on the gravel
that I mistook, one last time, for an acorn.