Some Things I’ll Miss

When I am dead, I will miss pears, and freshly sliced pineapple, andpeeling grapes with my teeth, and the smell of a ripe cantaloupecarried indoors from my mother’s garden, and I’ll miss the sunlighton August baseball fields, and the funk of dirt, ground between mypalms, and I will miss the small, warm bodies of sleeping cats, andthe smile a certain woman, now dead, once gave me as we held eachother and caught our breath, the full moon, its job complete, watchingus through the window. And I will miss the smell of rain, even nowI miss the smell of rain here where I’m trapped in this blind cubicle withall the other cattle, the milk of our lives drained out to make someoneelse richer, while, in trade, I get a few hours or so at home, squeezingan orange that is only the memory of an orange I once had, long ago,before everything I will miss when I’m dead began its slow journeyaway from me.