“What none knows is when, not if”
the line that both begins and ends Bidart’s
sestina makes all the in-betweens distant.
How strange its acknowledgement puts everything
in a new light, like new colors, like the shade of the sea
and the sky, blending into continuous muted blue.
There are no edges here.
The only contrast begins with brown sail boats
that carried us to all the places we thought we
needed to be. And maybe there is a brown cloud
overhead that echoes the boats and the tiny figures.
At age eighty death is an exasperating constant companion
whose power lies not in the future but in its acknowledgement
of impermanence, not that life is necessarily more meaningful
but that life is so imminent when death is so near.