Afterward, the driver of the carpool asked
if I’d chosen an ideal number of years I’d like to live.
The woman whose body we’d carefully prepared,
wiping and rinsing, untangling locks, and toweling,
wrapping in cloth with sacred knots, pillowing
in straw and protecting from unwanted light,
from whom we’d asked forgiveness, before and after,
for indignities we’d caused and mistakes we’d surely
made, and by whose side we’d read the prayers,
each in their moment, one for every step closer
to the tapping in of the coffin lid, had lived
more than a hundred years. Sometimes I think
I know who I’ve been in the greater part
of a century I’ve been alive. Impossible to say,
though, what’s left behind on a summer sidewalk
or dropped on a lonely corner. There’s a rumble
of roller skates somewhere in the distance.
Near the old house, the sound of a zipper
closing. Whose life, I wonder, am I trying to bind,
whose story mark out, with my narrating
and fussy editing? Above is mostly darkness,
darkness and aimless dispersal. A scant layer
of air holds lightly to the surface of the earth.
Look up and you would think it goes on forever.
But the sky is a thin coat in which to huddle,
fading and weakening till it vanishes. When I imagine
what’s in store for my life and the sheltering body
of this world, I have to look away from the raveling
sleeve of my separate self, the work of a body trying hard
to stick together, inward, beneath this crackling skin,
beyond dignity, beyond anything I can name as ideal.

Judith Chalmer’s most recent book is “Minnow,” (Kelsay Books 2020). She is the founder of Vermont Jewish Poets, a regional chapter of Yetzirah, with which she was a fellow in 2025. In addition to numerous journals, her poems have been included in anthologies such as Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, How to Love the World, and Queer Nature.

*First published in Watershed Review