And one is relatively long.
I'm going to read the last poem in the book
because I like it a lot, and I'm reading
Sport of Kings, which is also about horses,
so I'm having this moment where I'm again obsessed with horses.
At the end of life, a secret.
Everything measured.
A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason, other
than you are naked before him, and he is bored with nakedness.
Moments ago he was weighing your gallbladder
and then he was staring at the empty space
where your lungs were.
Even dead, we still insist you are
an organ donor, as if something other than taxes
outlasts death.
Your feet are regular feet.
Two of them.
And there's no mark to suggest you
were an expert mathematician.
Nothing that says that a woman loves you when you died.
From the time your body was caught up before him,
to the time your dead body is being sent to the coffin,
every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.
The man is a praying man, and has figured what it means.
He says this is the soul, finally,
after the breath is gone.
The soul, less than $4,000 worth of crack.
22 grams.
All that moves you through this world.