Fading Light

Like a city, lighted,
the body resists the dark.
Its studies and complaints
burn like windows, the mind
watching in the distance.

But the weight of the body
pulls it down,
an irresistible darkening.
One by one its lights
go out, an itch somewhere
igniting and dwindling
like a flare, the windows
each suddenly blacking out
-- each like a bat wakes
to the night, turns loose
and flies outward and high,
black into black.

And finally the mind too,
released from the last
of its beacons, goes.


Going, by Wendell Berry