I read, once, a story about a poet who could feel a poem coming, usually while outdoors, and would rush headlong at the house, or anywhere that might hold a pen and a scrap to write upon. I know this feeling, though not as intensely. It is more like a sudden and steady tumble from within. I need only sit still and gaze upon the words with my mind’s eye, transcribing onto neat legal pads. Never the computer.

The writings arriving at the keyboard exist on another plane. Cultivated. The tumble down-on-paper variety are more like a surprise visit from a beloved friend. Peggy or Andie. Effervescent and alive.

I am surrounded by disease and death. The daughter of a friend, a walking buddy, and a relative all with cancer. Greg’s cousin, died in a forest, unexpectedly and too damn young. A once musical finch found, stiff and floating, in the stock tank; the woman whose book I just finished. A time and phase of the here and now. I try to be okay with it, not to get completely sad and overwhelmed. It befalls every last one of us, after all.

But. Still. It is the end. Flesh to ashes, consciousness on the wind.

I have no thesis here. My words are a wretched scribble. Maybe that’s precisely it, the knowing, the pondering, that matters. A flicker in the background to make a body consider the precious nature of life, how it could vanish at any second.