Unattended Death and Wasted Time

I tell a timid student start writing heroic couplets. Loose 
ones, but still.  I figure it’s like giving her a hand to hold, a boost, 

a folding chair for a nervous kid to push on a new ice rink. 
She bitches form’s a ball and chain. I roll my eyes. Well, I think

it’s a car, I tell her. Get in, find out where you want to go. That works.
I love teaching afternoons, slow mornings with Josey, all the perks:

coffee, a newspaper cool from the porch. In the Boston Globe 
we see a body was found in the woods. Just someone on his own,

“an unattended death.” What is that, Josey says, an old person just 
walked off in the woods?  We see huddled caveman grandmas slip out of huts,

float off on sheets of ice sliced off the main. I say you could take
some end-it-all drugs out there, slip into sleep on a bright day

in late autumn, warm enough that if no one finds you, if you left the orange
pill bottle at home, no one could know for sure. Did he walk toward

that phrase, “an unattended death,” know that’s where he wanted to be?  
Was that the goal, desired outcome?  Or did he ever know at all?  Three

months ago we sloughed through leaves in crisp light that made
everything just right; blue sky, lichen-laced stones, precise shade

sketching trees above Elizabeth Bishop’s grave.  Now we are trying, true, 
to comfort each other, our oldest friends having picked up someone new.

I find the best way to knock myself out of sorrow is tough 
love, how good I’ve got it. You feel unappreciated, baby?  That’s rough.

Jealousy!  It’s human, sweet. Shakespearean, even. 
You love your friends; if you didn’t care you wouldn’t

care. Tough luck, they love another. Tough love, pointing out that I’m 
not dead, or sick, incarcerated. And I have plenty of time.