threnody ovenbird I enter the room where the poet lays dying, their body a wasteland of words and whimpers. I sit on a hard plastic chair at the end of the bed and watch while nurses flutter in like moths, their fingers touching the sheets, their voices dusty and dark. The poet’s love sits beside me and we hold a silent vigil, watching the rise and fall of failing lungs. We watch, and catch the moment when the poet’s eyes fly open, and they sit in the tangle of a white hospital gown, and they begin to recite their final poem, which comes from the heart of the universe. I begin to sing, a melody without language, improvised from grief’s pentatonic scale. The lover finds a beat with her finger nails against the whitewashed wall. Together we raise the beams of the poet’s last performance, a monument to the most unlikely hope. When the last notes fade away and the last words fall from the poet’s sugared tongue there is a stillness that lingers and slides slowly, inevitably, into the death that was always waiting in the wings to take its final bow. 260403 what's it to you? who go blather from