the unstained

death is silent
and knows
what was taken
from Absence
must be returned

death is silent
and comes
to teach
the intimate
return

for death itself
just as quietly
slips into mystery
the unloomed
upon return

questioners of the power
of silence
of return
remember
death’s silence

harnessing silence
the fearless embodiment
the universe
watches over
the universe

---

Post Script

I published this poem while my mother was in hospice. Earlier that week, I had described our experience as a liminal space between life and death. I had asked whether she was afraid of the unknown, and I was relieved when she told me that she was not. I do not remember whether I consciously directed every line toward her, but she was living very close to the poem. Her response now enters the phrase “the fearless embodiment.”

“Absence” is capitalized here not as a claim that nothing matters, but as a name for an origin that cannot be grasped or possessed. The poem imagines life as temporarily formed from that mystery and death as an intimate return. Yet death is not permitted to become a final authority. Death itself also returns, quietly slipping beyond the reach of explanation.

I now hear “the unloomed” as what is no longer woven into a separate form. It does not describe a destination or offer certainty about what follows death. The word allows the fabric to come undone and leaves what remains within mystery.

The final stanza does not imagine a separate power standing outside the universe to protect it. Through each living form, the universe attends to the universe. Fearlessness does not come from defeating death. It comes from embodying life without separating life from return.

The title does not mean untouched by grief. I read “the unstained” as what cannot be permanently marked by either arrival or departure, even while individual lives are changed by both. My mother died less than a month after the poem was published. That knowledge now belongs to my reading of it, but the poem continues to speak about death beyond any single death.

The accompanying image shows the Helix Nebula, a gaseous envelope expelled by a dying star. Death becomes visible as release, radiance, and redistribution. The star’s ending is not hidden, but neither can it be reduced to simple disappearance.

Image credit: The Helix Nebula: a Gaseous Envelope Expelled by a Dying Star (2004). Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. R. O’Dell, Vanderbilt University. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.