How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
                                                                                William Blake

Oh death, let me try
to look at you, I have the desperate urge
to lock you in a gaze. Let me try to
tell you about the dark, about
the bat that flies a vector inside it,
its sonar so subtle it can sense from afar
whether an insect is edible, and about the Alpine moths
that defend themselves
from being sensed by plunging into a free fall
because that’s what my mind does

when you appear, death, it sinks,
and avoids and looks away
and plummets down into the dark
while you circle and menace and
...