If I should die

The poem’s opening question—what if I die before you do?—sets up Poem 54 as an exploration of the anxiety in a species gifted/cursed with the awareness of its own death. Humans possess a too-fallible, too-vulnerable body that is nevertheless freighted with an intellect aware of its failures and its temporariness, as well as, for many, a soul designed by a Creator to survive the body’s death. In this, humans are a most complicated and contradictory creature far more able to raise the poem’s opening question than to answer it.

The poem, then, is a search for a strategy to calm that anxiety. The poet rejects the logic of pretending death is not real—rather, the poet searches the natural world and then the social constructs people have created to find some way to accept the inevitability of death without tears or fears. Nature, with its bustling energy, offers the poet the reassurance that any individual element of nature once gone cannot diminish the larger energy field. Therefore, one person’s death does not matter because nature continues unabated.

In turn, the poet uses the bustling world of urban commerce to suggest that humanity itself has created faux-ecosystems. These ecosystems, like nature, are self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.