For Len Roberts

Cause of death unknown.  Had never been fatally ill before.
			Death Certificate, 1880s

Until I was twelve, worn out 
and God’s will were the reasons 
my relatives died, my mother 
speaking like a doctor, citing
visual evidence
or unknowable matters 
of faith as if each were
a diagnosis of disease.

In the King James edition
of medicine, the self-help 
my grandmother relied on,
there was the finality
of dropsy, the chronic palsies,
what Jesus cured, like leprosy
and possession, the devil
imbedded in the flesh like ticks.

Before she was born?  People died
from convulsions and fever,
from infancy, age and tissick,
the collective name for killers
that came with coughs, as frequent
as smallpox and grip of the guts,
what the dying did, at last,
when their digestion failed.

Approximation.  Guesswork.  
Less of that now, the x-ray
showing the shadow that will kill us,
the blood sample spilling numbers
that count us out, each tremor
specific, a thousand names 
exactly right, pinpointing
each particular way to die.

Amyloidosis, for instance,
how one friend, this week, has gone.
And now, after memorial,
after an hour of tributes
by poets who traveled hours
to eulogize, I sit with my wife
who orders a glass of Chambord
for a small, expensive pleasure

in a well-decorated room,
the possibility of happiness
surprising us in the way
hummingbirds do, stuck in the air,
just now, outside this window,
attracted to the joy of sweetness
despite the clear foreshadowing 
of their tiny, sprinting hearts.