I pass to the other side of the page.
--Pablo Neruda

On the other side of the page
where the last days go,
where the lost poems go,
where the forgotten dreams
breaking up like morning fog

go
go
go

I am preparing myself for death.

I am teaching myself emptiness:
the gambler's hunger for love,
the nun's hunger for God,
the child's hunger for chocolate
in the brown hours
of the dark.

I am teaching myself love:
the lean love of marble
kissed away by rain,
the cold kisses of snow crystals
on granite grave markers,

the soul kisses of snow
as it melts in the spring.

On the other side of the page
I lie making a snow angel
with the arcs
of my arms.

I lie like a fallen skier
who never wants to get up.

I lie with my poles, my pens
flung around me in the snow
too far to reach.

The snow seeps
into the hollows of my bones
& the calcium white of the page
silts me in like a fossil.

I am fixed in my longing for speech,
I am buried in the snowbank of my poems,
I am here where you find me

dead

on the other side of the page.

© Erica Mann Jong

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