Sunset

Sunset, quiet, except for happy birthday to neighbor's child, virgo, and all that means, purity of morality, inability to scheme, whatever else the stars dictated. Woodpecker climbs oak, Connecticut. Not ten years ago this mountain was completely forested, untouched since early arrival of Europeans. Now my parents' home and others stand in new clearings. The birds do not seem to mind. Sing, and deer occasionally visit, from where? Out of the pre-historic past. That I must die is my every third thought. On my hands and knees, cold sweat, my own body murdering me. I meet death with the philosophy I lived in life. Acceptance of the loneliness, the unregarding beauty. There is that shoreline along the straits to Puget Sound, in mist, the generations of sea birds nesting on the water.