Death Still Walks In


In the old days news of it traveled by foot.

—Billy Collins, “Death”


Here’s how to miss the death

of a friend whose house

you glide by every day:

               

To start, be sure to catch

the first prognosis, then some

of the subsequent progress,


till her remission gets you briefly

off the hook, lets you breathe

and ease back into feeling


you’re as free as seeing her

walk again along the street.

Then, when her husband’s 


standing over what will become

your listening shock

in a coffee shop, go on to ask him—


now only five months too late—

“And how are things going

for your wife these days?”


so that his bewildered eyes

can sweat the guilty glistening

from your own, and so that


all day and all the next

this old news can circumvent

then crisscross the cracked and


hard-packed terrain of comprehension,

turning up undeniably during meetings,

conversations, the trip into work,


and in your dreams. “Only three

weeks before,” he’ll marvel,

“she’d hiked ten miles in Alaska


with our kids”—which will make

his next vacation all the odder

and all the more alone.


Here’s hoping he can freely comb

that moonlit Mexican beach,

lace his long and worthy fingers


around her Sunday birthday,

retrace the I-Am-Woman spring

that was in her stride and sprightly hair,


face how she was nobody’s fool,

the warm-witted epitome

of Baby, don’t tread on me.



D. R. James, retired from 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021).  

https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage