When the Cholesterol Catches up With Me

Lord, if there really is reincarnation, please,
I’d rather not come back if I don’t have to.
Whatever you have planned for me
cannot be as good as this has been.
I feel like an old soul
who got my dues paid up
the first half of this lifetime.
Since then it’s been, as Raymond Carver said,
all gravy.

1.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
and the hunter, home from the hill.

Those were the first lines of poetry that
memorized themselves within me after childhood
as though I always knew that after
all the alarums and excursions
would come this peace.

I don’t much care what happens
in the immediate aftermath of my death
because I won’t be hanging around to see it;
just please don’t do anything sad.

Let there be parties—
one on the west coast for Seth and Carol,
maybe another on the east coast for my daughters;
but not those parties where people like me stand around silent
because we can never figure out when it’s our turn to talk;
throw a party like an open mike,
where people sign up and wait for their name to be called,
and everybody sits and listens, sipping coffee and tea.
Let there be jokes and stories—and music: let it begin
with Louie Bluie singing “When He Calls Me, I Will Answer.”
Halfway through, Steve Earle, “I am just a pilgrim on this road, boys.”
And at the end, as everybody is walking out to where the food is,
Doctor John: “Didn’t He Ramble.” Good and loud.
And let there be poetry.

Not necessarily an overly polite open mike:
let there be mom jokes, and if anybody gets tiresome,
too full of themselves, good-natured heckling.
But if Alan Neff comes, don’t let him talk.
For everyone else, generous applause.

And let there be beautiful women; one of the great
privileges of the poet life is the license to stare
at a beautiful woman with her lips moving;
you can never get too much of that.

As to the food, consult Gregory Hischak’s poem,
“The End of the World Bake Sale.”
Pay special attention to the passage about fudge
with nuts being better than fudge without nuts.

2.

When my daughters were little and we lived in Dorchester
we used to take them on weekend afternoons hiking
in the Blue Hills. They’d say “Where are we going today?”
and we’d answer, “The Blue Hills,” and they’d piss and moan,
“Not the Blue Hills again?” and we’d say, “Oh be quiet.
You know you love the Blue Hills,” and they’d say,
“We hate the Blue Hills,” and that would be that—

until we got to the Blue Hills and we would find always
one parking space, or one car just pulling out,
and Megan Kathleen and Annie would be out of the car
and into the woods, checking out frog ponds or lady slippers,
garter snakes, pine cones, toadstools or horse manure (gross!),
butterflies or blueberries in season, all the dozens of
woodsy phenomena you never see on city streets,
and for the next couple of hours it would be like
herding cats keeping the them out of the poison ivy
and within hailing distance.

Once, on a wet day in early spring
when Annie was still in the back-pack,
I slipped going down a hill:
my muscles still remember the terrible torque
of willing my body to twist in the instant of falling,
twist in order to land on my stomach and hands
and not on my back and on Annie
and Joan said that twist was
the greatest athletic achievement
of my life and I think she was right—
so what if it’s not a very high bar?

A few Augusts and a lot of changes
and one personal ad later I met Carol
and on one of our first dates I took her hiking
up that same Hawk Hill, and at every point of
prospect we would pause to kiss (I think that was
the first time she told me I was a good kisser;
I didn’t ask her compared to what?), pause
to kiss and enjoy the view—the haze, the treetops,
the cars on 128; maybe a hawk. I suggested we
move in together and she said no, bad example for my girls.
I digested that a few seconds, wondering if I wouldn’t
be smart to hold out for a woman with—oh, money?
but Good Angel observed that I could end up
kicking myself for letting this one get away,
so I said, “OK, then, let’s get married.”

Not long after that my daughter Megan,
in college in Boston, told me she’d gone hiking
with her new boyfriend, and I said, “Hiking? Where?”
and Megan, sheepish for maybe the first and only time in her life,
admitted, “The Blue Hills,” so obviously recalling
all those protesting Saturday car-rides
that I could afford the good grace not to comment,
although I must have smiled a lot.

3.

I don’t want to be closed in a box
to decompose slowly. As soon
as reasonable, burn my body.
Get my ashes crushed as fine as possible.
Dump them into a cardboard box.
Take them to the Blue Hills. Wear boots,
even if it’s high summer, and very dry.
Follow the Skyline Trail to Hawk Hill.
(If it’s spring, watch out for rattlesnakes.)
Pass the box from hand to hand
and scatter me along the trail.

All that long digression was so
you’d understand why the Blue Hills.
All that and the fact that what I’m asking
is probably illegal (which is another reason
I like it) and that The Blue Hills would be
an easy place to get away with it,
Fenway Park being not probably available.

No big ceremony. Chat among yourselves:
the small, warm Jack reminiscences that
didn’t quite rise to the level of the open mike.
I’m happy thinking that of the five women
named above, at least one would be present;
and anyone else who was interested—
maybe put the word out
to the Yahoos in my Yahoo group.

Why this particular disposition?
Because I think Walt Whitman got it right:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless...

Unquote.
Do the scattering on your way up the hill,
so that on your way back down, you may truly
look for me under your bootsoles.

Don’t litter; on your way out,
dispose of the box responsibly.
At the Blue Hills, there’s a trash can
in every parking lot.