A Final Hour

A Final Hour

Do you think there is any

personal heaven

for any of us?

Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,

will call to us, meaning us?

                                    Mary Oliver

                                    from “Roses, Late Summer

I think, by then, she was quite relieved

to be rid of all of it: the loose and torn cape

of skin she wore like a beggar

who’d, in a fit of fancy or resolve, turned their cup

upside down for the rain to plink, plink,

plink against, it’s drip, finally, the reliability

of her doled and controlled morphine.  And her bones,

poking through that cape, her hips and sockets.

I’d stare and stare at the gauze of them, the thin

almost-pall cover, as though, propped on her right

side since her last bed-check, her pelvis was the center

tent flap, as though, when the storm

really arrived, I could crawl beneath those flaps

and watch the firmament crack itself like an egg

against our baking bowl life and slide

off, yolk and all, a sun going down whole, 
not breaking, not even on impact.