Sean Bishop

 

—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, from The Hagakure

We like to believe in the unconquerable will—
as if the noose were just a style of tie
that seemed, one day, to match one’s shirt. That’s why
all the best deaths are suicides or murders:
Beheadings. Crucifixions. Anything to deny
that it all ends in tears and diapers: the samurai
hilt-deep in himself among the orchids, or Caesar
with the air whistling through his new holes,
mouthing his lines as Brutus crosses the stage.

I have this friend who wants a car wreck—
conscious just long enough to choose the last road
if there’s actually a road to choose.
And someone else I know prays for a stroke in bed
while he works it and works it inside his young wife;
feeling the artery pop, then going ahead
and coming anyway. The way I’d like to end my life
is nothing like that. Give me old age, a liquid diet,
lung cancer and a family sick of my whining.
Let the other men go on gouging their eyes
and dragging each other behind chariots,
because I think I know the big secret
of those bearded ancients: they lie.

And although the master, Tsunetomo, said
the way of the samurai is found in death,
he was also pushing eighty when he wrote that—
decrepit, probably shitting himself, so scared to die
he kept making final statement after final statement
until he had a book so long he’d resorted
to expounding things like when it’s okay
for a soldier to wear makeup, or what sort of lunch
one should pack when flower-picking.

And yes, I know that even I am getting tired.
So I’ll cut it short, and tell you I don’t hope to die
at all. Not ever. I only said that
so when finally my chest begins to fill
with the same black bilge that has taken most
of the men in my family, you’ll think
I intended it. And you’ll think so even more
when, in my morphine delirium, I begin
to pluck the rotten teeth from my mouth
and hand one to each son and grandson
until the last kid arrives and I’ve nothing to give
except my gums. Nothing to say
except Et tu? Et tu, Bruté?
(only I won’t be able to pronounce the t’s)
and he’ll either laugh or run away
and keep running, and maybe beg
for mercy when his own time comes,
like the worst warriors, and the most
honest men among us.