Classic Poem

Senility gives greater pause
than death does: Auntie Brooke
now babbles and knows no one.
Though we all mind what she was —
the beloved matriarch
and inveterate clown.

And had death intervened, even
at ninety, wouldn't we all
agree she'd still taken (as
the phrase is) to heaven
a light wry and jovial
as ever it was?

But for this , for this , we've scant
theology: the slow
living-entropy of the mind.
Not merely indifferent,
she tries to know,
and is not deaf or blind

but as though drowning — the soul
drowning in the body, even
as that's drowning in time.
Till we ask if a Black Hole
must govern here, not a heaven,
let alone reason or rime.