" Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan”

Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning. "

― Jack Gilbert , Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982