Smith - Unplugged

I saw a dragonfly waltz above your voice.

You never knew how the sound drew wings...
how hearts soared and memories danced
on the floor of fading proms.
I watched old women lose their frailty,
middle age men grow hair
and children frolic as if you had brought them the meadow.

I tried to tell you that angels had chosen you as home
to anything they wished to sing,
but your father kept plugging your ears
and you let him
because obedience has a similar pitch to flight
until you're actually mid-air
and finally out of bounds.

You stood in your own regard,
which is always a mistake,
and let it transform your opinion.

I tried to tell you
what the dragonflies know.

HSS Concert September 2012

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A Good Death

There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that 'being'. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the 'dying'. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death. - Edwin Shneidman, A Commonsense Book of Death

I thought he was dead. I reached down, wanting to touch him, wanting to feel the delicacy I saw. But my gentle stroke brought an arch to his body and my error was realized. Not dead, but passing over. Surely now I could hear him gasp...labor in these last moments. He was on his back, dying like a turtle...like a slow, heavy turtle. This was no good death. To die on the doorstep of an ugly building on an ugly swath of cement, could not be a good death. To be grounded in the path of footfalls, people who come and go and rarely look anywhere but into the screens of their cell phones...could not be a good death.

I thought of burial, perhaps to honor him. I wanted to honor this dragonfly for Marion. I reached down, but saw movement again and I was afraid. I have never been comfortable keeping watch with the dying. There is a choreography to it that I have not learned. I am even less comfortable with the dead. I remember my husband touching his dead father's hand...holding it. I could not. I remember his mother, and my sister in laws who dressed her embalmed body, and set her hair...loving in it...but I could not. The shell of a person frightens me. They are no longer of it, nor can I be. Not yet.

I got a piece of paper and gently turned him over onto the page. His leg scritched against it momentarily, as if to write, perhaps an epitaph. Burial now seemed a ludicrous idea. Carrying him carefully against the shield of my body, concerned the breeze would send him free falling, I preserved his pristine wings and unmarked body.  I found a shaded section of the parking lot with foliage he could decay into with dignity. I left him, coward that I am, to die there in the arms of a flower. But I think he prefered it, having been at home with her all his life.
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