What is it I will have left when I leave, little but the milkweed silk,
My inky fetishes, my spirit-papers and my urns, like the simpler
Despot in Afghanistan—whose only leavings were a small herd
Of mostly still unrusted Land Rovers with linen songbooks holding
All Islamic hymns and some antique Americana
(Judy Garland, Andy Williams, Bing),
And just a few blond-gold effigies of self, in the gnarled garden
Where he had spent endless hours petting his favorite cow.
The half-life of neptunium is 2.1 million years. My moment
Is over—the most velvet of the annuals live far less than a year.
Regarding loss: I had been its isotope
From the youngest age. Not momentous,
Just the small bunkers of a child’s lack of long-term memory
And its greenest lengths of moss. A pet green turtle expired after
The long hot summer of my own short-term amnesia, the drought
Of my forgetting to water him while I was away riding spotted ponies
In the South. Every memory is a death, even the sweet ones:
Whatever rabbit eating parsley in the photograph
(I was a-beam with joy) in our unkempt yard—where mint grew
Tall and accidentally—is gone.
But at a certain moment in the middle of the summer dark
Standing on the porch in the dotted Swiss of night, if you watch
Almost microscopically, you can perceive the orange daylilies then
Begin to grow back after death before your eyes.
In my opinion, I am not scheduled yet to go,
Not anywhere, just now.
—Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018)
