Through the Portal

reluctant poetry

It’s just another magic place to go, 
like pocket parks or winter forest clearings,
where you can stop deciding who to be, or why;
and ease your iron shoulders of their weight:

So I am not afraid to get away from here
into the vasty deep that beckons there,

alight with wisdom, through the door called death.

But death requires a password I don’t know
and I must prove my self to be myself

if I would pass that way at all.

So at the portal, I must know and tell

My father’s maiden name
My mother’s mother’s son

my fifty favorite songs, in order, and
the sixty-seven brightest mornings
ever I beheld, and how I breathed them in, 
and whether I gave thanks sufficient to their glory;

and then I need to know and say the names
of each account I ever held with each
admired foe or lost beloved, people meanly
loved though fully meant to cherish;

and finally then I must reveal the whole and
useless username I gave myself 
these many years along; my foolish code
for who I thought I should have been or could;

before the portal, grudging, finally lets me pass.

And my impatient soul exhales at last
and saunters through with a sigh of relief 
and a shake of its mottled wings.

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