Let us examine together the thought

That he who dies well has lived well.

I turn it in my hands like an apple.

Bitten at any color? Try it. Try it.

Beget a son, says an old French proverb,

Write a book, build a house, plant a tree,

This will be to live full and well.

One knows men who accomplish all

These satisfactions, yet die badly.

Turn, turn a small sculpture in light.

What is it to die badly? Is it where

One dies? My father-in-law at eighty,

Having lived well, died in his cellar,

Not in dignity. Is that what is meant?

Is it how one dies? Thrombosis, the gun?

My small mother died of being tired.

Is it why? I turn nearer my own dying,

And away, to glass, apple, old wood-stem,

Some tough image of dynastic health.

Dying a little every day by choice

And accident, I dim like scratched glass,

I dry in the grain, shine with rubbing.

But I cannot forgive God Baker's death

On a plane exploded in the Egyptian desert,

Nor forgive God a hundred hundred

Living in my air, and he burned in sand.

The elder corrupt, mummified in evil,

Live three times too long, comfortable

Politicians I do not consult God about.

Those smilers. He'll never grin again.

That he who dies well has lived well

Is a Roman thought, and a fine lie.

Now I am biting the soft of the apple.

A man can live foul, and die famous,

And thirty volumes wither to one poem.

God spills us from the bowl of the day

From hand to hand, as I roll this idea

A little while, for some glint or weight.

I have decided to live out my own life.

As you leave, there are apples in the bowl.