A friend just told me he was dead
A friend just told me he was dead. He produced
the newspaper, flipped to the obits, sure enough:
there he was, right down to the initial.
“You can see why it spooked me,” he says,
without a laugh. I look at the paper to see
if it’s a fake, the sort produced for gag shops
and sold at the beach, in places for tourists
and drunks. Real as, well, real, I determine.
But, much as one’s life, so too one’s death
requires reading to the last word, the period,
or as the Germans say, punkt. Near the end
were things my friend has never been.