Mary Oliver died today
as she so often predicted.
Eighty-three is a good age for a poet to die:
old enough to have long production,
old enough to have regarded the brackets around natural life.
She’s gone.

It is winter. Life in the Midwest is sere:
browns, grays, near whites,
frozen ridges and refrozen rime.

My natural world shows little
of birds.
Nothing
of reptiles,
of insects,
of tiny mammals.

When I die I hope it is February
in a place just as sere.
Better to fade out in a scene already faded
than to be the lone grayness
surrounded by a burst of flora and fauna,
a wasteful abundance of color
a cacophony of birdsong and pig whistles.

Transitions are easier for the living
if there isn’t too much change.
I don’t know what they are like for the dead–
probably less dramatic than we fear.