The final analysis

We must volunteer for oblivion. 

If we try to avoid it, we will only find

our every brave and resourceful stratagem

ends up looking like cowardice anyway

in the final analysis, 

and there is no reason,

no watertight logic we can deploy

that is not revealed to be lies

leaking cowardice and extenuation

through a thousand desperate excuses.

You do not live by being a death dodger.

When you were young did you run in the woods

and occasionally encounter a carcass

and interrogate it with a stick

and lay flowers on the remains

of that poor animal or bird

just to give childish expression 

to the profound sadness it evoked?

That was your own grave. 

Have you ever fallen asleep

as rain covers you in a blanket of sound,

slowly dissolving you in its incessant whisper?

That is death. When I was very young

I lay in the garden under the rain

and lost myself in the sensation of it

and although my irritated impatient parents

summoned me indoors and offered me a towel,

and we subsequently moved house,

and an entire lifetime has elapsed since,

I think I am still lying there, under the rain.

I think I will always be lying there, 

in that garden, even after I am dead,

and perhaps someday, when everything 

has been reduced to indecipherable ruins, 

overgrown by a riot of vegetation,

some child will rattle a stick between my ribs.