Our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot
be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily
haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration.
—Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial
A day of quiet wonder in my hands
holding nothing but bewilderment
at the green world knocking on my window—
I am alive! fresh from harrowing
my address book, a kind of columbarium
page-after-page, of the too-soon-
too-many-dead. Bob, heart attack,
at fifty-five, Amelia, throat cancer, sixty,
Jane, double-vaccinated, Covid, seventy,
all of them here, then a moment, suddenly—
