Beggar's Cup

I'm slowing down now,

imperceptibly, it seems,

like a river spreading itself out into a delta

where the minute metallic taste of salt, like paradox

blooming in the darkness, takes me out.

I can see down the road that someday soon

I'll give in to this and with one deep breath

dissolve as easily as the memory of splashing headfirst

into this life has drifted invisibly beyond feeling.

Old age always arrives with his two companions:

sickness and regret, an old woman says to me.

Then come the war stories wearing as her pain

which she feels is front-page news to me

but is only the door to after she exists.

Now, before my ego breaks down

into a pile of prickly pick-up sticks,

before my final dispersal rolls in on the swell

of some never-before-felt feeling that releases me,

I'm wondering where my consciousness will go,

if after death I'll still be a me, minus the striving

and million forms of the fear of dying

that's misshapen whatever is left of me

because I was so deeply living it.

Time to sink back into the world again

which, like a colony of panicky ants, continues

to dismantle and carry off bit by bit

the fragile sense of unity I once glimpsed of it.

Here, I say, with my empty beggar's cup,

to anyone who will listen, is what I was able to fill up.

It's the joy of simply being. Which took my whole life to make.

It contains all that's left behind of me and when I'm gone,

everything I am. And it'll stand for everything I wasn't.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2007
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