Forgetting how much life we have lived dead
we cry Oh Loss! Oh Loss! as if we’ve only now
noticed the bobbing of amputated desires decorating
the waves of the wakes we’ve left on our way

into the earth. Into the sky. Along the edge
that goes on being edge forever
unless you turn back.

Which would be a loss of future but
no greater than how going on regardlessly
is to be mired and lost in the swamp of the past.

If measured in atoms our lives stretch
nye on to infinite. In eons, a lifepan’s no more
than a moth’s: hatch, molt, mate, die.

But linearity is time’s best ruse. If we remember
how much live we’ve lived dead then death is
both after and before time then life
is what we’ve been losing all along
and death only how we return to
what we’ve always known.