from Death Tractates

I wrote two lines from a poem on the back of my cellphone in Sharpie last night, but they have mostly worn off already.  It's my favorite Brenda Hillman poem "First Tractate," and it's the last line of that poem.

I will quote the poem here in its entirety.

First Tractate by Brenda Hillman

That the soul got to choose. Nothing else
got to but the soul
got to choose.
That it was very clever, stepping
from Lightworld to lightworld
as an egret fishes through its smeared reflections –

through its deaths –
for it believed in the one life,
that it would last forever.

 

When she had just started being dead I called to her.
Plum trees were waiting to be entered,
the swirling way they have,
each a shower of
What.
Each one full of hope,
and of the repetitions –

When she had been dead a while
I called again. I thought she was superior somehow
because she had become invisible,
because she had become subtle
among the shapes –

and at first she didn’t answer, everything answered.