"Song of Gifts."
I just this titled this poem without thinking about it.
Later we can begin to realize that most people,
a lot of people wouldn't consider the things in here
gifts, which are called gifts.
And that seeing a thing as a gift
was just a matter of how you looked at it, I guess.
I recognized it.
"The first gift was hilarity, as language vanished
and my senses were restored.
The second gift was the free place
I knew wholly down to the vibrance
of the scales of each fish swimming the brook
through the valley of grasses.
The third gift was the hand darkness
offered from darkness with knowledge
that to hold a hand was comfort and silence the moaning,
and that my efforts to pull it into light
were violations of love with no success possible.
The fourth gift was the vision of my loved ones
dead with age and beyond me forever.
And the chance to ask my own corpse a single question.
The fifth gift was fire.
In that fire, I burned without even the promise of death
to relieve my anguish.
The sixth gift was release from pain and access
to eternal energy.
The seventh gift was grace.
The last gift was re-entry into language
and the loss of all previous gifts
into memory for the final gift restored my citizenship
in babble."