The existence of the infinite is in every respect impossible. 
           ---Maimonides 

Here is pretty much how things happen.
Out in the snow, a figure
waddles his way up the hill
and the freezing wind blows so hard
that the bundle we know as him
smashes into a rock. 
One dizzy sparrow grazes the windshield of a Camry 
halfway back from Thanksgiving in Des Moines,
and a hundred and ninety-two cars trailing behind on black ice 
skitter and crash outside Battle Creek. 
Someone calls an ambulance,
someone else calls the newspaper;
somewhere in the rubble of the wreckage 
someone dies so quickly that their life ends
before the telephone is answered.
Somewhere the sparrow
will be worshipped as a god. 
 
In the Alps, strange winds gather
and glitter down the mountainside,
lathering the slush and crushing the lupine,
hurling the bees against the rocks.
The minds of the people who live in the valley
begin to burn—Alpine wind, Foehn,
and on the third day of wind the little villages
reached only by gondola
are hives of underwashed Alpsters 
frying the mice they find behind their beds.
 
When the ether dome was in full swing
and anesthesia was still a strange dream
forgotten by morning, patients threw themselves 
from the rooftops of buildings 
to avoid the knife, hoping the firmament
would catch and save them.  Or they endured
six men holding them down
as the sound of their old bones
fell to the floor.  
And after defending the dancing of Jews 
in the ancient city of Alexandria,
Hypatia was killed by a crowd with oyster shells
and shards of pottery—
they scooped up her heart 
on fragments that once held bread and sweets and pearls.

In Polish the metaphor for getting ready to die
is that you are ‘packing up for your journey.’ 
Do you lie awake at night,
wondering what to take on your departure?
The whole universe, says Maimonides,
is composed of substance and accidents. 
And the heart, he tells us,
is in constant motion, ruling
over the other members, communicating to them
through its own pulsations. If for one instant
the beating of the heart is interrupted,
man dies, and all of his motions and powers
come to an end.  
So if the wind 
gets an idea about disassembling us,
particle by particle, carrying us off
and inheriting our ions
as it pearls down from the mountaintops,
should we pack a rucksack and wait for a ride,

or take shelter in the bank of fog by the river,
or cover ourselves with dry leaves  
and play dead?   Stop, heart, 
call the waves on the radio,
transmitting messages from the infinite.  
Stop the luminous machinery
the fantastical device of the bronchi.
Let the frozen script of the earth
find you and take you to bed.
Let the sheets of grass
and the pillow of moss
cover you sweetly. 

Let the walls of your tomb
be painted with daffodils.
When they come to check for your breath, 
whisper that you are already packed. 
Close your ventricles and then your eyes. 
When they try to flog you with canes 
or take bellows to your lungs
to pump them full of life,

or when they lift your heart 
from the socket of the body
and slide it into a cool dish,

just remember the impossible length of night 
and the gravity of darkness as it pulls 
its long slow chains across the sky.
Let them sigh as your last breath
curls back into the cold furnace of the ribs.
Farewell, sweet pea.  Farewell false dawn,
and tea that never wakens. 
When the room is quiet again,
and the ether of the sky has evaporated,

you can slough off your body
and those messy shards.  Walk around,
feel your new ribs wiggle.  Your vanishing
is only the beginning of the infinite.