Testament 
    So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
    with its grains of sand drifting down,
    not as an object in our world
    but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
    drifting down grain by grain,
    sifting away — I'm sure everyone must
    see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
    Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
    of ego with which we began, the mass
    in the upper chamber, filters away
    as love accumulates below. Now
    I am almost entirely love. I have been
    to the banker, the broker, those strange
    people, to talk about unit trusts,
    annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
    to leave you whatever I can after
    I die. I've made my will, written
    you a long letter of instructions.
    I think about this continually.
    What will you do? How
    will you live? You can't go back
    to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
    And your poetry? It will bring you
    at best a pittance in our civilization,
    a widow's mite, as mine has
    for forty-five years. Which is why
    I leave you so little. Brokers?
    Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
    the world's great business. And the sands
    in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
    you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
    where we buried our good cat Pokey
    across the lane to the quarry?
    Maybe the tulips I planted under
    the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
    woodpeckers who have given us so
    much pleasure, and the rabbits
    and the deer? And kisses? And
    love-makings? All our embracings?
    I know millions of these will be still
    unspent when the last grain of sand
    falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
    on the mountain of my love below. 

                          Hayden Carruth