Intimations of Mortality

When it happened,
when nurses gathered around my bed
and performed emergency ministrations,
I felt as if I were disappearing,
gently drifting without weight,
faint without fainting, here without
being here underneath the feather-light blanket
anchoring my body to the bed.

Housed still in flesh and bone that seemed
to make no impression on the mattress,
in a body I now began to look upon
as belonging to another,
I entered a silence enclosing me like a cocoon.

There, I watched as if I were once again, years ago,
standing on the back porch with my sister,
listening to her say,
“Whatever death is or means,
all I know for sure, he has not gone,”
on the evening before our father’s funeral.