Not so easy as you say. Choosing the time,
before it’s too late, even if you’re no coward.
Compos mentis essential. We have heard the chimes
at midnight, mother. The bell beating one.
Shuffle in the tower. Ghost at the doorstep
whispering. Come. Go. Which is it?Go, go, go, my mother chanted in half-light,
my fingers pressing the dropper’s bulb.
Morphine, you, you faulty elixir. Drowning
in her lungs, slowly, nauseous, too awake,
breathless except her exhalations: Go. Go. Go.
Her persistent insistence. I listenedlate night into morning, I went shuffling
to the next room, fell into a darkness, woke
to her coughless coughing. An airless tomb.
A coil of phlegm around her throat, a coil
of breath strangling her. That murderer.
Days later, desperate to live—blessed the hourshe died—not a feather moving. In the bathroom
mirror, I saw only myself: wise, romantic,
vainly thinking Severn, Keats, absorbed
by my own clear image. What would I do
that I had not done for her? Consider
not too carefully, yield like a swan to itsinging as I eat the potion. This is my body.
What is to be? Forget why and wherefore.
A maze, a moonlit path, a wolf, no crumbs.
How at last to sit, lean, lie down as if to sleep.
Could I risk looking at the trees?
Readiness is not all. A shuffle in the woods.