There Are Deaths We Die and Still Live

There are deaths we die and still live.

They are the measured deaths.
A man stands against the pantry door
and marks with a pencil how much of himself
he has lost since the mark of the previous year.

There are deaths we die and still live.

There are those who agree time and again
with that which denies them
until they become what they are not,
slipping degree by degree
into standardized sanity.

Some suffocate in the layered dust
of cumulative compromise,
each breath of their own life,
shallower than the last.

Some are pecked constantly
by a finite number of middling sparrows
until the infinite is drained from them
and they are desiccated,
like an inattentive fish,
not noticing the tide flowing out,
dies beached, gasping useless air.

It takes years to die unhurried,
by the inch and by the pound,
until one day a vague memory of your original self
passes the cleft where you hide from your dream,
and, like Moses’ dread glimpse of the mountain god,
you see the desecrated glory of your life.

The only cure for small deaths is to die all the way down,
and begin again as a dead man, dead woman rising.
Rip off the grave clothes of your unlived self
and walk nakedly into the life you have neglected.

At first it will seem strange and it will be strange.
You will eat a lemon and it will taste yellow like the sun.
You will hear a familiar song you have never heard before
and sing it flawlessly.
You will walk and the stones will kiss your bleeding feet.

At this moment of rebirth you will be very old,
you will be ancient, your blood and bones
will remember their future origins,
and your iambic heartbeat will drum
its welcome of the always arriving past.

This will be your life,
to press hard against the earth
as you stand upon it,
to rise up only a little
from the soil of its enormous love.

2007