What Death Said

1.

DEATH said:
Pull over to the side of the road.

And Lewis Itkin began to feel pressure and splitting
in the tectonic plates of his body, a burning, a rawness
like red ants up his arm.

DEATH said:
This heart attack involves only you.
Put the car in park; highway marker 324.

Lewis Itkin listened robotically, ruefully
to DEATH's roust and pulled his white Mercury
to the shoulder of I-95 North.

DEATH said:
Now close your eyes.
I'll tell you when to open them.

Then

2.

… a sort of SENSORY SLIDE SHOW, a pastiche of the past:

     Flies in late May, a broken canoe paddle, his old blue Schwinn—

Two sunburned children tugging on his trouser leg—

     The sound of a cocktail party rising—

Mercury balling, a broken thermometer, mother with a cool compress—

Now DEATH was wedging him open—

All he could hear was a song in his head that he had once
become annoyed with,

the song helped him to resist DEATH's creeping all over
his body like bugs,

          it threshed through his mind . . .

3.

DEATH said: It is true

I am slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.

Yet, there are stages to this thing I do.

. . . AND in the background Lewis Itkin could hear the sounds of the state trooper smashing the windows of his locked, traveling salesman's car to carry his six-foot-three frame out onto the stretcher where the paddles zapped and zapped until a white feeling overcame him . . .

. . . He thought to himself, there is a HUMMING after all . . .

          . . . How he had once found meditation impossible, but

now the white noise of it was a lovely push against
the will of pain—

4.

DEATH said: Here is where your heart stops, here at marker number 324, I-95 northbound lane, New Rochelle, New York, 10:32 A.M. EST, November 3, 2003.

. . . AND Lewis Itkin began to remember what he had forgotten those sixty years ago, when he chose this life, before the angel hit him and he forgot everything . . .
. . . AND DEATH made Lewis Itkin take the first step in renouncing
his self, and his soul began the slow rising of undoing and unchoosing,
and he thought briefly of that movie he liked, The Red Balloon.
. . . AND the lighter he felt the more clearly he could see
each one of his children as if he were dreaming their lives . . .

5.

Lewis Itkin could still feel his mind.

But where was his body?

For a few minutes he ghost-roamed through the halls

of his life. A sweet odor, like pomegranates or urine. The sun

hurt him as it came in through the four eyes of the house.

In front of a mirror, only the heat of invisibility

and Lewis Itkin said, So this is not you, and the mirror said, Yes, this is not you . . .

THEN he saw them for the last. They each stood

at the distance the living must take. A young woman

(his eldest) in a green dress brushing her hair,

thinking about a poem that says: Language wants to avert death.

The poem with a blue bicycle in it. How she couldn't stand the rigorous

impossibility of the everyday. He'd taught her that, somehow and indirectly.

Now he saw it amplified in his mind's eye: never enough

money, time, love, patience. She had married an older man,

and lived in an older house. Then,

by the light that came in through the half-shut door (his second child,

his second vision) rubbing her pregnant belly,

a little foot kicking. She had been the dutiful child, the good girl.

Now, at the moment of his death, yelling at the dog to shut the fuck up.

A core puzzle haunted her. Love was confusing, gambling more exact.

. . . AND then Lewis Itkin thought of his body alone, far from home,
at the morgue. Who would retrieve it? Who would dress it for burial?

A panic...