I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
—César Vallejo, “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone,” translated by Robert Bly

I already remember the room of my death,
its window offers crows as raucous laughter.
And cherry trees wave their boughs in breezes,

their kindness seizes me like my grandma’s hugs,
she whose apron pockets ferried butterscotch
candies wrapped in golden cellophane.

Circling the windowpane into a charm bracelet,
comes a loveliness of autumn lady bugs, and
no one bends a knee to weep amidst leaf fall debris.

A honey scent of sprawling Daphne vines
that climbed the porch rail of my childhood
wafts up through graphite time to the present.

Nights, I witness only the resonant reflections of
familiar, cordial ghosts making bedside vigils,
my own face too distant for Narcissus gazing.

I have not viewed the stars in thirty days,
though I perceive their celestial beingness as sure
as translucent angels swim within a crystal pitcher

on the lace-trimmed pill table nearby,
yet I do spy a moon path spilling over the lawn
like blue milk or a new dawn’s soft snow.

The room of my death holds aloft the entirety
of the Atlantic ocean, sandy shores gritty
against the damp soles of my feet.

I tramped hundreds of miles to York, Maine
once to find myself in a musty motel room,
gloom that smelled like someone had died there

and smelt of salt air, gulls astride wispy clouds
wheeling above the beach just outside the door.
I’m still unsure of all that I divined about

myself on that solo coastline adventure,
save that I’m bone-anxious company and
October is the most deliciously lonely month.

It’s not postwar Paris, nor a Thursday, unless it is,
where lattice shadows of the Tour Eiffel ripple
through my stippled quilt like open-weaved fencing

anyone could effortlessly clamber-dance over,
as does my little dog, her tongue a tissue for tears.
In this clear room of my death, a heater ticks on,

mimicking dad’s old Pontiac, battery dead cold,
but warm air here plies such gentle hands.
Late afternoon, silhouettes of tall lowland white firs

waltz across walls into visions of wild sea tides,
and the air’s jazzy dusk notes ride as heavy
on the earth’s swooping shoulders

as droopy, moth-winged hydrangea blooms.
Life looms large in other rooms,
where chairs stomp over wood-beamed floors

and frypans clang, steaming up fresh hungers.
Rains come and go, dreaming of Michelangelo,
I in death’s room am divorced from all sorrows,

wasting away into tomorrow’s faded sunshine.
Gray sky arches in through cloudline glass,
its pondgrass breath whispering not yet,

else my grandfather’s, who died when I was eight,
sing-sighing “Release Me” by, as he dubbed him,
Engelbert Pumpernickel the great.

Firebrick apples wait in a blue bowl on the buffet,
decay with such quiet dignity, flesh waning to rot.
And somewhere not far, not far for soul pilgrimage,

a single coal-banded sugar ant begins the trek
of a thousand halting death-fraught steps
towards exalted, glory-wrought sweetness.