In the hospice vigil the ego vanishes. You with mouth open on the bed are you for everyone. All we are, I now see, is a you for someone else. Whoever you might have been exists behind a veil or is that veil or travels through, now, what veils there are. My voice and hopes might as well not be mine, as distant to you as a lesson sung to a mumbling star.
In the middle of the night dead silent death approaching makes itself even more solemn in what it wears: a shadow of pillars, a day beginning in libraries with the contemplation an author dares. Good wants itself in the mirrored orderliness of pairs. You are not you, tonight, nor quite good. A distant house in rural Vermont your last stop, your virtue and sharp body which fussed and elaborated, sleeps, hair a little mussed. You were full of lessons. Tonight I dream the lessons I see, the body dropping off everything and, at last, its own belongings, and finally, what it owned, the propriety that was never owned--- you as you, but you to only me.
