What Was It

That's sort of
What I've been stuck on: 

The way you wonder
A whole preceding life 

A body
Into pieces, 

With an opposite
Electricity that feels like it 

Fits, ending on
What we look like 

In a brain,
The other half thinking 

That someone ought to be here
Clean and together, 

That someone should have told us
We are the same, 

Popping up,
Ajar, obviously,

Up to the light.
It feels perfectly personal 

In terms of my hand
Through the memory of that story: 

That I think one day I'll meet you,
That I'm curious 

Also about
Naked feet, that I hate 

To talk so much
But I don't know how 

To not read this,
That the dead 

Fit well in this
Compost 

I am holding,
As the noon 

Strengthens, as the night
Lays down 

Many minutes
Before the end. 

We just kind of dance
Right around it,

Right around the message
That has always been 

The negative: the carcass
That fills the earth 

With use
And beauty. 

What was it?
How we married that with 

A little boat,
A great swell of 

The sweet lesson of
Death before death. 

I didn't mean
To be weird 

In dreaming the body back
Into mud, 

But that's always been the song,
That if we die we die 

In retrospect,
Facing death 

And a gorgeous show of grass
From lightest to 

Richest red.
And is this not also birth 

To make order
Of the numerous dead? 

Are we not also athletic
When we sleep?