ELEGY Poem: Dying, Not Death, by Clark Elder Morrow

Everything is at its loveliest
as it leaves.
All that is leaving has never looked
more lovable.
It’s the leaving not the being gone
It’s the departing not the being done
That’ll ignite faint aching sparklers in
Your gutsack.
The end itself is nothing: the definition of nothing.
The end itself is historically won, behind one.
It’s the long long landing, not the deplaning,
It’s the longheld fermata, and the long deferring of
The final calamitous chord, that
Will deforest the rich soulful glade in you.
It’s the last plaintive passage in the cadenza,
Not the suave genuflecting of the maestro
And his standing squad of string players, that will
Make you hamstrung and heartwrung.
The long slow descent before wheels-down, while I
Reminisce all the nimbuses of the players in my past,
Gives me time to see them take their bows. This
Is the parenthesis in which
The wrenching takes place. It’s within the brackets here —
In the borderland between Nostalgialand and Death —
That wistfulness deals out a thousand deaths.

Author: poetryfest

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