A character once muttered to her self who was elderly,
Gallant, that "Anything can be settled for a few days at a time,
Though not for longer." I spent a Wednesday pretending I could
Settle, that I had longer, like a mouse in a kindly trap that confines him
With a bit of the treat left that tempted him in, before dawn,
Reasoning to himself that nothing is hurting or gnawing him yet
And wondering whether it would be worse to be caught,
Terrified and exposed, thrown out into unpromising somewhere
Where he would be likely to freeze, starve, or be torn to pieces,
Or to never be disturbed, left to slowly dehydrate to death,
Pinioned, like the mummified mouse we ourselves once found in the trap
In the laundry closet where we stored the damn thing, unbaited.
Unbaited but happy to climb into the trap anyway, that was me,
That had always been me. Wandering in small circles, thinking.
I kept mistaking death for dying and what comes after.
Life is dying and nothing is what comes after. Death is a myth
Of the dying, a dysfunction and a destruction of other beings mistakenly
Recursively applied. Death, applied by an awareness of dying to itself,
Is a kind of Cretan paradox. If you're there, you're not; if you're not there
Who's dead, then, anyway? Only others can be dead. I can't be.
I shuffled some papers and drove home to the far side of my confines.
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