A Matter of Degrees

When I interned at City Hospital,

my task was to certify each morning

the deaths of the night just past.

From time to time a candidate

would move or moan, prompting

the verdict: Alive. No middle ground.

On a day like any other day

when the sun climbed a striped sky

to light an old man’s reminiscence,

On a day like that it came to me

that we die not all at once

but by degrees, like Socrates died.

There are those who believe

we live on, may it be so, at least

in the memory of those who loved us,

But old men die anticipatorily

a section here to the surgeon’s knife

a function there to inexorable frailty,

Ghosts of molted human fragments,

a lover abandoned, a forgotten friend,

wandered with the wholly dead the halls

of Old City, greeting the morning intern.

Blinders Up