Alex Dodt:

I isn’t real — at least as conventionally conceived: the self-contained me — and belief in that myth is killing me/you/us.

Thankfully, Epicurus is wrong.

We are everyday intimates with death — of a tree, a dog, yesterday, a home, a version of ourselves, loved ones; strangers, too, those we never knew to love but who shaped us and those who made our lives possible, who, as Ross Gay put it, “loved you / before she knew you by not slaughtering / the land” — and any I is not only endlessly intertwined with these others, but also its own end.

If we lived forever, would we write poems?

I write a lot about death, grief, transience, but not always as elegy. Or, maybe, it’s that elegy isn’t always sorrowful. Either way, I’m glad this poem has an ending!

The inverse of the Epicurus quote is true, if not easy to embrace — where I am, death is always, and where death is, I live.

I take this into my mouth and breathe. Soon, it will enter my heart.