Two poems about death

This week I'm tracing back over some poetry of mine, thinking of endings, loss, grief, and reckonings. Two works surfaced, both reflections on the deaths of two different and unrelated people– one I knew rather closely over my 30s and 40s, the other I'd never known at all but experienced their loss through a student of mine. There have been some complicated endings and beginnings in my life lately, none having to deal with actual death, but I can feel the metaphor of it close, sense it in my periphery, and so I'll share these past reflections here.

The Ferry at Red Bluffs
For Neil & Susannah

I am waiting, 
staring down at stones along a rough shore, certain that within one small area 
no bigger than my shadow, 
each small stone 
could be each person I’ve ever met. 
Some I will never see again, 
and further away          countless others
on this small strand 
that I’ll never know at all. 

Are we all just washing up on the shore, 
jagged monoliths worn to smooth pebbles, entangled, buried beneath, toppling over, polishing our surfaces against each other? 

The tide goes out
and I feel a sudden and infinite         distance
and begin to miss my friends
and wonder if I’m missing everyone else too. 
We are scattered, and where? 
Are you drying in the sun, 
warming in someone’s pocket, 
or flung back into the sea?

The Quickening
For Chris

A Korean student of mine was here studying
The day his best friend took her life
Eight thousand kilometres away

Through puffy eyelids and nicotine-yellow nails
Childlike and anguished, he painted—
Envisioning a threshold to a hereafter
And quickening his own urge to step through
Racing grief’s undertow on the other side of the Pacific 

We search for transcendence
Legs pumping on playground swings
Desperately wanting to know how to fly
Until we learn at last—
The expiration of things opens a door
To an unknowing
And slipping from chained vinyl seats
We pass from wanting to living-in
Projected into the void of tomorrow
Somewhere across oceans