Poem: "When Will It Come?"

Everyone has an autumn,
a twilight of their life,
before their souls slip
delicately away into
fields of asphodel,
pits of Tartarus,
blessed islands of Elysium,
whatever afterlife may be,
where souls walk
and the others there are made of cardboard.

When, I wonder, will it come for me?
Will it announce itself like a bear
prowling through winter woods,
woken roughly from its drunken sleep,
by a hunter's gunshots
echoing between the dead pines?

Or will it sneak upon me
not more than a year from now?
Will it come for me as it came for Schubert?
So hopeful in the latest bloom
of his juvenility, his heart
burning with piano trios, a great symphony,
and song after song after song after song,
each melody like a shattered piece of shell,
all of them washed up on the blank beach of sheet music
like a mosaic of harmonies
a mosaic of exuberance,
unperturbed even by the possibility of death,
inevitability be damned!

Or will that afterlife
come in, neither sneaking nor parading,
but will it just come in,
perhaps landing delicately from the ash-grey skies,
to the tune of some hallucinatory choir
mistaken, in this vast forest, for songbirds?
Perhaps there are angels in the wintry woods,
singing, whispering to themselves, looking at me
with a mixture of laughter and appreciation
that I am walking naked in this place,
skinny-dipping in the Styx,
pondering the aftermath,
asking if I will meet my heroes
while the snow gently falls from the grey sky.

The trees whisper with the wind.
They are not talking to me, but I can still hear them.
It is a kind of half-answer, only revealed when needed.
Perhaps the bear will stay asleep forever,
perhaps Schubert will stay entombed forever
in silence, no further music to scribble down
on a napkin in a Viennese cafe.

And perhaps there's nothing. What of that?
At least I spent some time pondering.
some time walking in the woods is healthy, after all,
because one walk is never like another, you know,
where the environment changes even at the
microcosmic level.

And, at the very least, I killed time.