And, Let’s not stop writing to each other when I’m dead.

And when I’m dead too! I said. When we met,

though we fell in love immediate and permanent,

we could not make a two-soul union,

nor when I left—each of us had to

work, on ourselves, for years, to get there.

And now we are there! Maybe this has been

death all along! Maybe life is a

kind of dying. Maybe this has been heaven.

Heroin

In an old mystery, someone is

returning, to a pharmacy,

the heroin her relative had not needed

before he died. I look up—

it’s night already—and ask myself, did I

really give Carl heroin?

Sometimes, when I was alone with him

for a weekend, the hospice nurses on call—

yes! heroin was the one

measured with the dropper, and given, to him,

under his tongue.

Even now, a year later,

a laugh bursts out of me when I remember

the time my tremor spoiled my aim,

and he barked, “Under my tongue! That wasn’t

under my tongue!” I like remembering

the vital ghost of the temper in him, and how it

felt being alone, in sleep-time, in the woods,

in the house with him, how dark outside,

how warmly lit by the woodstove and the

lanterns’ isinglass, and those thin-carved

golden shades like salad bowls upside

down which showed the ovals of the grain.

It had been fifty years since I’d been

alone in a house with a newborn—and I’d

hardly known how to care for her—

but now I had the charts for the heroin and

morphine for his pain and anxiety.

And we seemed to be in an enormous world,

which began even more than 5780

years ago, one which would never

end—and once it ended, it would always

have been, kisses and all—oh those tender kisses!

When the Cancer Has Come Back, Sleeping in His House with Him but Not in His Bed with Him

And in the night, each time I woke,

the sheet and mattress were level and sweet, I

put my trusting as-if-good-child cheek

down, again, on the surface of sleep.

And when my eyes opened once more,

across from me, through the big clean

glass, was the sky, as if colorless, with so many

tiny lights of so many bright

hues, golden, violet,

the pine pure black at night, two or three

hundred years old, and the sky bright

with hundreds, or thousands, of tiny lights,

gray, ivory, golden, violet,

I, at length, facing the dark

fellow horizontal of the hills—

to my left, the sky; the snow-covered lake

to my right; as if I were a dragon or damsel

fly, one wing of overcast,

one of frozen snow over ice over

water which, from underwater, is

golden with mica and pollen in summer

—my body, my life, a pulse of earth.

And sometimes the small motion-bulb

in the hall would glow, as he passed by

from his bed to the stove, to throw in,

with his accurate arm, a split of wood then