after all these years, you’d think I might have learned a thing or two…

such a fool

what becomes of our memories

when we die? do they simply vanish

with the last flickering spark?

so many years of careful assembly

and rearrangement – why would the gods

invest so much in something so frail?

maybe instead we pass a kind of key

to those we leave behind

so that as long as they remember us,

our life’s collection

of learning and stories, heartbreak and joy,

remains connected, alive, flowing

in waves of what we call wisdom,

what we call beauty, accessible to any and all

with a beating human heart.

as I wander, hands in my pockets,

I absently jingle my enormous ring of keys,

and across the heavens the ancestors

and all of those who went before me,

rejoice at this music, beginning to dance and sing

at the warm pleasure of still being known.

then one by one, they look down at me

and start to laugh, shaking their celestial heads

in wonder, that despite a lifetime afloat

in this ancestral sea of wisdom

I insist on remaining

a complete and utter fool.

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