Afterlife
There is no life after death. Why
should there be. What on
earth would have us believe this.
Heaven is not the American
highway, blackened chicken alfredo
from Applebee’s nor the
clown sundae from Friendly’s. Our
life, this is the afterdeath,
when we blink open, peeled and
ready to ache. Years ago
my aunt banged on the steering, she
insisted there had to be a
God, a heaven. We were on our
way to a wedding. I would
have to sit at the same table as the
man who saw no heaven
in me. Today I am thinking about
Mozart, of all people, who
died at 35 mysteriously, perhaps of
strep. What a strange cloth
it is to live. But that we came from
death and return to it, made
different by form, shaped again back
into anti–, anti–. On my run,
I think of Jack Gilbert, who said we
must insist while there is still
time, but insist toward what. Why we
must fill the void with light—
isn’t that our human insistence? But
we drift into a distance of
distance until proximity fails, our
name lifts away with any
future concerns, the past a flattened
coin that cannot spin. I am
matter spun from death’s wool—and
I bewilder the itch, I who am
I am just so happy to go.
Copyright © 2017 by Natalie Eilbert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“There has never been a period of my life when I believed in God or an afterlife, and I have wanted for so long to write about this from a sublime position. It would be a mistake to say that I am without awe simply because I lack a God—the lack thereof, the terrible beauty and bizarre majesty of now, that is what keeps me here when the world turns black. Our insistence is up to us, and we must praise our survival, that our presence is a singular and brief force.”
—Natalie Eilbert