Memento Mori

After we had made love,
and you lay sleeping against me,
I remembered death.

Then I was back with him,
constrained within the tumid walls of his disease;
a voyeur of hospitals,
of sterile, sun-washed urine
and the familiars of approaching loss.

I see him as I saw him then:
a tired, old man, sad for his Baltic homeland,
sad for his family and the griefs of his forgetting.

Those last hours when he gave up loving,
when we knew nothing was left of him to love,
those hours sear me still.

I turn and hold your slumber close.
This bed enfolds us, reaches back to him,
unites love to death: the years to lives and places.