when everyone is
gone, who is left, at what point
future merge with Death?
Who is left when everyone is gone?
He watched Diana’s yellow Volvo disappear toward Traverse City, the faulty muffler putting along after the car disappeared, somehow as lonely as a dog barking far away in the night.
Who is left but me standing on the porch on a June morning, and able to see a green leaf fall, for the first and last time, fifty yards away.
Am I here if I abolish the input of my five senses?
Sure.
There’s still two hundred pounds of standing meat ignorant of the leaf.
The sense of compactness alternated with the banality of worrying about one leaf out of trillions.
He had felt a similar sorrow when an area of forest had been flooded long enough to kill the trees — as a child he had talked to trees until a neighbor kid had caught him and told everyone.
Water had always been a question of too little, enough, too much.
His thought processes lamely trailed off, then returned to the porch.
At what point did changing his future merge with eternity itself?
Death?
From Warlock by Jim Harrison, (1937-2016) New York, Dell (1981).
No Haiku For You 