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For those of us young healthy we will face the mourning of our elders. Bury them beneath the earth. And for those of us who believe the living ever-live we will stand by the graves of our teachers and know that we like those we've buried are living ancients.

There is so much sweetness in children’s voices, And so much discontent at the end of day, And so much satisfaction when a train goes by. I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying, Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks, Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night. A handsome child is a gift from God, And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand, And a wound is an inheritance from the wind. Some say we are living at the end of time, But I believe a thousand pagan ministers Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind. There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist Has been laying his hands on earth for so long That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles. It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel So much satisfaction when a train goes by.

Before long the end Of the beginning Begins to bend To the beginning Of the end you live With some misgivings About what you did.

My father’s dying resembles nothing so much as a small village building itself in the mind of a traveler who reads about it and thinks to go there. The journey is imagined in a way not even felt as when years ago I knew my father would die someday. The idea came up as fast as a curve in a road which opens out to an unexpected vista, and now in this journey the road gravel crunches under my tires. I miss some of the streets, get lost, get lost. I find I’m no tourist anymore and settle into the oldest human assignment. Bury your father and live forever as a stranger in that town.

Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one. And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at a time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is a thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same skin when you look in the mirror, and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watchband. The changes you can make are small and costly—better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing that you have to leave eventually. You know that because you have seen others do it, others who were once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours and then one day they are gone. No forwarding address.

You wanted to be a butcher but they made you be a lawyer. You brought home presents when it was nobody’s birthday. Smashed platters of meat she cut against the grain. Were a kind of portable shrine — I was supposed to cultivate a field of  bliss, then return to my ordinary mind. You burned the files and moved the office. Made your children fear a different school. Liked your butter hard and your candy frozen. Were a kind of diamond drill, drilling a hole right through my skull — quality sleep, late November. What did it mean, “field of bliss” — A sky alive “with your greatest mentor” — I wore your shoes, big as boats, flopped through the house — while you made garlic eggs with garlic salt, what “represents the living teaching” — Sausages on toasted rye with a pickle, and a smother of cheese, and frosting right out of  the can without the cake — You ruled with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, you raged at my stony mother, while I banged from my high chair, waving the bloodied bone of something slaughtered — I was a butcher’s daughter. So all hail to me — Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw and the bakeries of the cities fall, I stomp the docks — spew out a bullet stream of oyster shells, I’ll drain the seas — the silos on every farm, the rice from the paddy fields, the fruit from all the orchard trees, and then I’ll eat the trees — I’ll eat with money and I’ll eat with my teeth until the rocks and the mountains curl and my blood sings — I’m such a good girl to eat the world.

Not in the world of light alone, Where God has built his blazing throne, Nor yet alone in earth below, With belted seas that come and go, And endless isles of sunlit green, Is all thy Maker’s glory seen: Look in upon thy wondrous frame,— Eternal wisdom still the same! The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves Flows murmuring through its hidden caves, Whose streams of brightening purple rush, Fired with a new and livelier blush, While all their burden of decay The ebbing current steals away, And red with Nature’s flame they start From the warm fountains of the heart. No rest that throbbing slave may ask, Forever quivering o’er his task, While far and wide a crimson jet Leaps forth to fill the woven net Which in unnumbered crossing tides The flood of burning life divides, Then, kindling each decaying part, Creeps back to find the throbbing heart. But warmed with that unchanging flame Behold the outward moving frame, Its living marbles jointed strong With glistening band and silvery thong, And linked to reason’s guiding reins By myriad rings in trembling chains, Each graven with the threaded zone Which claims it as the master’s own. See how yon beam of seeming white Is braided out of seven-hued light, Yet in those lucid globes no ray By any chance shall break astray. Hark how the rolling surge of sound, Arches and spirals circling round, Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear With music it is heaven to hear. Then mark the cloven sphere that holds All thought in its mysterious folds; That feels sensation’s faintest thrill, And flashes forth the sovereign will; Think on the stormy world that dwells Locked in its dim and clustering cells! The lightning gleams of power it sheds Along its hollow glassy threads! O Father! grant thy love divine To make these mystic temples thine! When wasting age and wearying strife Have sapped the leaning walls of life, When darkness gathers over all, And the last tottering pillars fall, Take the poor dust thy mercy warms, And mould it into heavenly forms!

It’s said they planted trees by graves to soak up spirits of the dead through roots into the growing wood. The favorite in the burial yards I knew was common juniper. One could do worse than pass into such a species. I like to think that when I’m gone the chemicals and yes the spirit that was me might be searched out by subtle roots and raised with sap through capillaries into an upright, fragrant trunk, and aromatic twigs and bark, through needles bright as hoarfrost to the sunlight for a century or more, in wood repelling rot and standing tall with monuments and statues there on the far hill, erect as truth, a testimony, in ground that’s dignified by loss, around a melancholy tree that’s pointing toward infinity.

A lizard does not make a sound, it has no song, it does not share my love affairs with flannel sheets, bearded men, interlocking silver rings, the moon, the sea, or ink. But sitting here the afternoon, I’ve come to believe we do share a love affair and a belief — in wink, blink, stone, and heat. Also, air. This is not a fable, nor is it bliss. Impatience, remember this.

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience? If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man: a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard. Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen, no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water. Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas, a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.