Unalert, the ant hastens across
Fissures of the departed centuries,
Tiptoeing its cobalt legs in near-silence.

Unfeeling, the black and polished marble,
Over which is forged makeshift passage,
Cannot sense the press of living appendages

That this creature exerts. Headstones touch
Nothing, they are our artificial meanings
Laid to provoke bare memories of the living.
---
Even while she silently faded
From diseases rebelling against her defenses,
My grandmother remained peaceful. What stung was not

The certainty that she was about to depart,
But rather the absurdity of everything, the shock
Of life transfigured to ludicrous confusion.

I recall just a phantom of her at the end:
Fragile, at rest, talking when she could,
Soothed by my father's history of her days.

When I later attended her in a bedside wooden chair,
Listening, unwatched, to fragile, moving lips,
She spoke of family and of transit.
---
Life moves on until it is extinguished,
Interrupted by the cold errands of fate
Which still moving hands and quiet searching minds.

To where do we travel after the end?
Is there a warm delivery into bliss and
Understanding? A home in the afterlife?

Or is there nothing at all? Death takes from us
Everything of value to our touch
But those memories which connect us to meaning.

-1/5/2001