Life Span
Isn’t it a fine strange thing
how little information we can glean
about our future surely-numbered days?
How many snowfalls? How many
restless nights, or long drives
to how many friends’ homes?
Is it possible to count
the scores of leaves that fell
in each of the witnessed autumns?
Can these be measured: the light
sun shower that startles midday,
fox leaping like a lamb in the meadow,
someone’s recording of Rigoletto
distantly woven into the drone
of a diesel engine?
We are born and find that we live
in a world of water-bears and
wolverines, tire irons and railroad
tracks, shale, gas, stem cells,
sycamore trees. We categorize.
We kiss. We weather our own climate,
mark out our joys. We span everything
resembling a ravine, pleased with our
ingenuity. And then comes death,
which, like the hermit thrush,
has whistled all along, half-hidden,
as though it knew a fine strange thing.
*
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/