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 wearying 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 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.

Tweet

Copyright © 2011 Jack Myers All rights reserved
from The Memory of Water
New Issues Poetry & Prose
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission