If you knew
your date of death
you’d turn yourself into
a candle with wick enough
to carry your flame 
to its sputtering end.

If you could predict
the time you’d end
you would put on 
bright clothes and dance
on the sidewalk in front of
your future cemetary.

If we loved you enough, you say,
we’d let you do those things
unfettered by our impending
grief; in fact we’d ask you
how you did it and then
we’d try to do it for ourselves.

Now then, the crisis:
we must decide
at once how much
we love you.  
Do we love you enough
to disobey, or do we dare to obey?

Worth sharing:
a description of the light

streaming between the houses
onto the melting road ice, but

better to share the light itself.
Come over and see it with me,

or wait until I’m gone to come see it
for it doesn’t matter if I am here,

or will be here
when you come; although

it would be good to see you,
what’s most worth sharing

is that light, and if I am gone
it will remain. Come see it

and if I am gone by then, think of me
for a moment, then let me go.

In my last years I swallowed
what I was supposed to,
drank not what was forbidden,
moved as I was advised to move,
and nevertheless ended up dead.

Can’t speak of what 
that’s like — there are contracts,
and it’s different for all anyway.
I’ll say this:
nothing about the passage itself

should terrify you.
It is as simple as changing
clothes, easy as a dressing room,
calm as a Saturday morning 
without mirrors, with nowhere to go.

That said, here are things to consider
before you cross over.  Kindness
to others, yes.  Taking stands
against preventable agony, yes.
Relating, loving, speaking passion,

of course.  But also,
there is a remarkable
emphasis here on whether or not
you occasionally stopped 
in the middle of the day to listen

to the day — to all of it
from truck snorts to humming bees.
You were expected to hear the world
as a symphony now and then;
they never tell us that soon enough.

So — go do that.  Go stop the moments
and sit with them.  It will prepare you
for much of what it’s like here — cannot
say more than that about it, except that
it’s not at all a bad existence.

It’s nothing like life to be dead.  
There’s more singing, if you can believe 
that.  There’s also more silence. You
are always comfortable.  You 
are always fine — it’s going to be fine.