The Life Is Always Richer Than the Record

It’s funny how the phrases often
Turn out darker than the day, how texts,

Shed like isinglass exoskeletons,
Have a sepia tint suggestive

Of more melancholy than you feel,
How the experience of dying,

Which flows gradually, like a river
Fanning out in a shallow delta,

All reflective surfaces and calm,
Mostly calm, even lovely often—

Even where the water grows brackish
With proximity to the ocean—

Contrasts with the detritus of poems
Deposited as future fossils,

Shells and driftwood, occasional trash
Left scattered along the delta’s shores.