Perhaps I have always walked death’s road.
After all, my corpse so easily reaches out
‘cross space and time to touch its siblings:
to lay in the snow on a stark Russian mountainside
(it was not your fault, Igor, you could not have known);
to curl up among the masses huddled
beneath Pompeii’s tephra burial shroud;
to drown in Sendai’s monstrous waves
or freeze in the north Atlantic on a clear April night.
These deaths, these beloved dead,
are clear as my own memories.
Is this witchcraft?
Is this wyrd?
(Is this anything?)