The extra verses of your life
Are written in a foreign hand
And possess an uncertain beauty –
The cadences are all ungainly,
Or else far too cutesy.
You almost fear they’re written mainly
To impress, an order forced upon the finished world,
A trespass on the full mystery of less.
But who are you, now, to countermand?

The extra verses of your life
Carry truths half-told
And deeds half done.
They write that you have won.
When the facts are much more messy,
The will left on the table,
The house that’s bought and sold.
Your dinner, once at least, grew cold.
But is the preacher telling fables
To admit that you were blessed
Into the realm where pain is turned to stone,
And stone to breach, and breach to life,
And life to marble, glass, and bone?

The extra verses of your life,
After you give up your pen,
Will turn life back around again
To the word, in whom we reside.
So trust, in this accepted time,
That all you leave outside the Temple
Will work its way to the Beautiful Gate,
Which is to say, you won’t be late
And all that you are not is ample
To raise the only mostly dead.
And in your stead, we the living
Will not be false in giving hope.
For we know, in our blundering, lumpish wise,
That all choirs live to reprise,
And all life lives to be heard, and said,
Long, long after the final lines are read.