And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally -
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded -
something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields
like billions of white bees.
Not to take it so personally -
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded -
something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields
like billions of white bees.
- Franz Wright
from Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems
photo by Ed Varsson
with thanks to whiskey river
