Mother's Embrace (English)

In an old miner's house on Diaz Avenue
in the kitchen
The tiny borough of Nesquohoning stretching out across the valley below
visible from the back windows
its beginning and its end well defined - discriminated as a Daoist might say
six crosses peeking out above the rooflines

My mother said:
"So where do you think you go when you die?
Don't you think you go somewhere when you die?"

James said:
"That's baloney. You wanna know where I'm goin' when I die?
When I die I'm goin' right up there on Bear Moutain.
I'm gonna be cremated and Barbie and Wimpy are gonna take me up there.
That's where I'm goin'."

Where do we go when we die?
Gilgamesh 4,000 years ago wanted to know
He walked the length of the dark tunnel
crossed the great sea
and still he never got his answer

He staid beside the body of his foster brother
his lover
Enkidu
until the worms came and Enkidu never rose from the dead

I went to see my old aunt Arwilda
amid her passionless death throes
her soul, whatever that might be, long gone
her eyes blank and still beseeching solace
We laid her in the mother's cool embrace
it was a dry March that year
the frozen grass in Stroudsburg Cemetery brown and matted

For many winters and springs
falls and summers
I brought roses to her tomb
I waited in the world above her body till the embalming fluid turned her flesh to soup
And Arwilda never rose from the dead

I don't know where we go when we die
we go somewhere
maybe nowhere more than into the earth
into mother's cool embrace
our limbs
and guts
brains and sinews
our genitals
hopes, dreams, memories
of lovers and family
of friends and jobs
of joy and sadness
our strengths and our frailties
our pain and our anguish
our joy and bliss
all dissolve down into the dust
and come back in new bodies
of fish and foul
rose and hawthorne
stag and doe
rock and rain
atom by atom we return slowly

I don't know where we go when we die
James says he's going to Bear Moutain
My mother says she just wants to disappear
She doesn't want to feel pain any more ever

Me, I don't know where I will go for sure
Some of me should lay down in the flowers behind my church
and some of me should lay down in the leaves of the valley where I played as a boy
and some of me should lay down in the northwest of Wales where the sun sets over Ireland

Someday the mother who bore us all
will hold me in her cool arms again
wherever else I should go
I will go back to her
Someday all too soon I will find out just what that means

Someday all too soon
the mother will hold me in her arms
and never let go of all of me