Will I know it is the last time,
like I know now, your hand on mine,

the last kindness wrung from earth,
like madness falling all around.

The words are dropping like rain
lost to posterity, emollient, orange,
daffodil, where did they go? The words
I used so often they wore thin.

The crows, the wolf, the honking geese
gone—like milk I meant for brownies,
like chocolate softening in its wrapper,
like breath.

Now I will say a few more times
how I fossil, how I skeleton,
how often I gibberish for the pleasure
of assonance, of rhyme.

If I only have a few more words,
let them be solution, sympathy,
suggestion. Let them be resonance,
river and resource,
let them be.