Advance Directive

Randall J. VanderMey

Goodbye to the letter carrier and the clack he makes
with the mailbox lid, goodbye

to the cat who will still greet his arrival
with a lift of her hare-lipped head. Goodbye

to my catlike stretches under sheets and all other forms
of self-willed pain. Goodbye to the next chapters

in Willa Cather and their desert beauties, chapters
I'll need now an afterlife to finish, if

life after permits, fond wish. Goodbye to cramps
in the right hand from writing. Goodbye to writing

and the urge to write, to mutual misprisions and consequent
needs to write, needs I've so often

swallowed, whose seeping toxins make today's aches
ache more. Goodbye to those parts of me

that have already been taken or broken, those
that never were part but nevertheless grew

between, among, or up through, fostered and festering,
ultimately bearing gifts

of darkest kind, prolific power.
Goodbye to those parts that remain, curiosities and dross,

and those that shall be harvested, my parting gifts
to who knows who. Goodbye to every act of love,

all giving and receiving, all touches and permissions,
all abidings and too-long tarryings, every sustaining

illusion, every ecstasy but one,
and to every fading, every love

except the love that holds me up
for sacrifice, the love I've so long returned

in unequal measure. And whatever tubes and
scopes and bellows may say, whatever

rumor or chart, whatever Five Wishes
or advance directive, when the fire

that lights the poem from within, the poem
like the ash pit still smoking near the trail bikes

the morning after, when that fire goes out,
with a drowning hiss or a simple

ceasing, when the muse goes out, when the muse
goes back to the holy mountain with her wild report,

Ah, then! I will have made my last goodbye.
I will have left it all to you.

—Randall J. VanderMey