I'm going to read a poem that's a tiny bit longer.
It's because I'm going to read another poem that
has the same subject a little later, the reason for them.
This one is called Rotten Angel, and it is the angel
of death in Jewish lore.
Malach.
In my house in Pennsylvania, there's
a little island down the river.
I imagined myself, in this poem, being buried there.
A place where nobody comes, underwater vegetation,
eerie and ugly, despicable, a weed place.
And I started the poem in Athens,
I saw one of those bases.
Hermes, in Greek mythology and Greek religion,
is the one who leads you into the next world, that's
one of his functions.
And I saw these urns with the ashes in them, well,
actually, once was in them, was a legend,
this is Hermes leading so-and-so into the next realm.
I started with a kind of, stole it from, Hermes oriented.
I finally found it when I was discovered and remembered
the malach, who was my angel of death, Jewish angel.
The Greeks are, I don't want to offend anybody,
I'm supposed to love all.
The Greeks are kind of cheap.
They make their gods do all kinds of different functions.
I mean, Hermes had to be a messenger,
and he had to be a guide to the dead,
whereas the Jews specialize.
They have angels that do this and they
accept that it's balanced somewhere else.
The balance and the Greeks have many gods,
and they are liberal there on the Jews.
We used to have just one.
So it's called Rotten Angel.
My friends still of this world follow me
to the bottom of the river, tripping over roots
and cutting themselves on the dry grass.
They are all over on the left side, drinking beer and crying,
and I am there by myself waiting for the rotten angel.
For my sake, it hasn't rained for 20 days,
and all the old jetties are showing up again in the water.
I can reach my arms up into the second row of branches
and pull down clumps of dead leaves and barrel hoops.
I finally find my clearing and fall down
in the dirt, exhausted, from 30 minutes of fighting for air.
I put an 'x' on the ground to start marking off
a place for the gravel.
The rhododendron and the iron bird,
my friends stand above me, a little bored by my death,
and a little tired of the flies, and the sad ritual.
How I would love it if I could really
be buried here, a mile away from my house in this soft soil.
I think the state could do this for me.
They could give me a few feet of Earth.
They could make an exception.
I tell you what really matters.
And all that talk about so many cents worth of fat, and so many
grams of water, is really just fake humility.
I would hate being dusted on the ocean,
or put in a drawer for perpetuity.
I want to be connected with life as long as possible.
I want to disappear slowly, as gruesome as that sounds.
So there is time for those who want to see me in my own light,
and get an idea of how I made my connections,
and what I looked at and dreamed about,
and what the river smelled like from this island.
And how the grackles sounded when
they landed in the polished trees,
and how the truck sounded charging up 611
carrying the culture of Philadelphia
into the mountains.
And how the angel must have gasped
as he swam back to the shore, and how
he must have dipped his head in the green water
to escape the gnats swarming after him
in the dirty sunlight, a million miles from his New York,
and his Baltimore and his Boston.