to live in this world

Today is April 5, and the 5th (holy shit) anniversary of my brother's memorial service. In the past few years, I've posted a variety of poems about grief and death and other forms of memorial poetry, both on this day and on other days (my tags are still a work in progress, but: grief poems, ave atque vale, elegies). One of the strangest things about moving my whole poetry archive over, though, has been looking at all the poems I posted before my brother died, including my very favorite poem about death, then and now: Mary Oliver's When Death Comes.

I thought I would go back to Mary Oliver, this year:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

—Mary Oliver (b. 1935) "In Blackwater Woods" from American Primitive, 1983.