Now without me by Richard Blanco

 NOW WITHOUT ME

by Richard Blanco

Now that my brow is as creased as my palms,

now that I am imagining my home without

me, now that I ponder the someday when I

and my hands will no longer be here needed

to till the soil of my iris beds. Now that I know

they'Il bloom like sapphires without my eyes

to praise them, or to wink back at the wings

of butterflies. Now that the lavender will still

perfume the breeze without my inhale, and

the ivy will scrawl without my pruning. Now

that chipmunks won't need my ears to hear

them chirp as they dart-and-dash, content

as children at play unaware of their mortality.

My father died at fifty-five. I'm fifty, supposing

I might only have five years left to breathe-in

the pine-scented breeze scaling up my hillside,

five years' worth of languid hours on my porch

with my cat, five years to ask why, despite a life

spent believing nothing but this life, now I want

to believe there's some god that only my pulse

explains in sync-not only with this here/now-

but with all I am from: my mother's lavish black

hair and sorrows, my father's immense silence,

my grandmother's scolding that I crafted into

a wisdom still guiding me like the aglow embers

of my grandfather's cigar, the iron-red memory

of his Cuban mountains he never beheld again.

To believe I didn't begin with me, nor will end

with me, never been a me, but a soul beyond

clinging to any home or country--a larger part

of a continuum in the amber light of each dawn

that powders my face and the drifting gestures

of clouds alluding to the first time we assumed

the sun's power with spark of flint on dry brush

to kindle our own flames. That this very poem

from my hands owes itself to the hands that first

mixed soot and tallow with imagination to draw

myth across their cave walls, and to the throats

that first tamed grunts into breaths of language,

gave meaning to the toil of spear and slaughter.

The cosmos may well be a chance clash of rock,

a callous dust, but now that sometimes I forget

names and days of the week, I want to believe

all my endeavors as willed by an eternal desire

held in the wide-open arms of the Milky Way

and in the voice of these lines as consequence,

as witness, ages from now for others to adore

as I have adored: fireflies like constellations,

moonlight shadows like showers, lark songs

like thunder. Lose as I've gladly lost my desire

to name everything or belong to anything but

myself amid my birches bending in the wind.

Imagine as I've imagined: life beyond my bones

that now ache with rain, and relinquish me.

An interview with Blanco about this poem:

[TK]: Now Without Me performs a masterful blend of consonance, balancing harsher pronouncements like a clashing callous chance cosmos with more soothing sounding aspects of life, like moonlight shadows and showers. Do you integrate the sound or feel of the written word with themes you explore?

[RB]: Yes, of course. Just as with a song, the sound of the music should reflect the connotations of the words. Extending Coleridge’s definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,’ I would say that poetry is also the best sounds in the best order. But this is an instinctual, complex, and often non-linear process. At times the theme informs the sound; at times the sounds develop and strengthen the theme.