Have you heard of this? An octogenarian,
nasal cannula and wheeled oxygen,
explains to me 

he’s ready and eager, exhausted
by consciousness. 
He’s shuffling down the trapezoids of light 

at the hospice where 
my sister works, where I’ve come 
with her tuna sub, pretzel chips. What’s that like? 
I ask him

as I lean up against an unmanned nurse’s station. 
I’m considering Katie’s mother here, 
how it was described to me

that around her breathing tube
she mouthed what looked like the words
“Help me” moments before her death
from a ruptured heart valve, a failed bypass.
It’s like waiting

for anything else, he tells me. The doctor,
post office. Holding an armload of stuff
at the checkout. I don’t want to believe it

though I believe it immediately, like learning 
how babies are born, it’s the only way 
the human soul makes sense, vestigial energy,

a pulled thread from some essential,
superconnected center, perpetually ready to snap.
Then what is anyone

afraid of? I ask. 
My grandfather, too, 

raged and gnashed against the leash
with which mortal pain had collared him,
requiring sedatives straight to the drip.
I had been taught to fear death

by everybody except the dead
but I felt close now, closer to the truth, verging

on enlightenment. Not in a Buddhist sense,
of course, simply able to stomach time and
decay. The man ruminates,

rubbing his chin. It’s either Paris, he says,  
or the dark. Afraid of never seeing Paris.
I think about how deep 

I’d like to implant certain memories, 
I try to slide a gleaming few

like shards of broken mirror
into my brain so they would stick
even if I was in crippling pain, chewed up,

gnarled as a severed paw. Anyway,
good luck, I tell him, since who the hell

knows what to say
to a man who leaves a candle in his window
burning for death.
And there’s only one way to respond

when you’re a stooped knoll in slippers,
a green bathrobe, and you’re inching off
down the hall to exit existence:
you too, he says, of course, and momentarily

it means planets, universes, collapsing dimensions 
more than it’s meant to, and then

it doesn’t, it means absolutely nothing 
and I’m alone again 

with the work of earning myself, earning sleep 
at the end of another long day.