a poem remembered

i had an interesting conversation with someone who I didn't know thought the same way about death as me - we both appear to have a near-unhealthy obsession, probably more honest to say a terror, with death being the end, there being nothing more, that awful notion of eternity, and reconciling that with a certain healthy agnosticism about an afterlife, heaven, whatever keeps you warm at night and makes you think you're going to see your dog and your grandma again. It probably stems from the issue that we're both tremendously self-obsessed - not in a selfish way, per se, but in a Whitman, Ayn Rand, exaltation-of-the-individual kind of way (in my more generous moments towards myself, of course) - and anyway, the notion of there being no more me is, quite obviously, difficult for me to imagine. Not that I really would have to, would I - but the abstract notion - coupled with the sad reality that some of my most treasured possessions, for instance certain books - might wind up unnoticed in someone's attic or just thrown away, no one remembering that someone revered them and kept them close through moves, and relationships, and numerous accidental dunks in the bathtub - the way some of my grandmother's things--letters, photos--were just discarded by my grandfather in his grief, and I wish we'd known he'd immediately go home and make good use of a dumpster in the few hours he was alone so we could save them.

But anyway - this all reminded me of a poem from Aspects of Love, a book that was turned into a play most famous, from what I remember in the New York Post during high school, for an all-too-quick full frontal nudity moment well before Nicole Kidman bared her Botoxed limbs for a Broadway audience. But I digress again, because I loved this book for its rustic south of France setting and its quintessentially French and British characters--the French women passionate and quick to despise as well as love and the British men who had no idea how to handle such emotion--for all their moral ambiguities and willingess to fall madly in love and into bed after eating omlettes and drinking beaujolais. Although I can see it right now, unopened for years, on the top shelf of my bookcase, I think I'll stay tucked in on the couch and see if I can remember the lines that conversation triggered a memory of:

Set down the wine and the dice, and perish the thought of tomorrow!
Here's Death twitching at my ear. "Live," says he, "for I'm coming".