If Infinity Died

(April 2021. A man named Infinity showed up at Re:Source to run a meditation event. He ended up staying, and his dog had puppies there. The rest is history. This poem was prompted by a talk with Infinity the night before, when he said that he could die tomorrow and that it would be okay.)

If Infinity Died

If Infinity died last night I’d bury him myself.

I would be the first to find Infinity’s body
Because every morning when I walk up the hill to the house to get water,
his super dog named Nova invariably runs out to greet me,
and she leads me to the backdoor of the garage
where she, her puppies, Infinity, and his cat Nova
sleep on a floor of concrete and blankets.
She is proud of Infinity’s grandchildren, her wriggling puppies.
Every day I visit the puppies, these growing burritos of the universe,
still stumbling and waddling milkdrunk around the swaddling blanket folds
of their dark warm first world beyond the womb,
where Nova once again birthed stars.
She did so herself, as she was born to,
with uncomplicated pain and uncomplaining grace,
while Infinity was very high on molly.

I am glad he found this place,
for one of the puppies is mine.
His name is Waldo, he is white and black,
and the black spot around his left eye
has a small brown smudge in it,
a germ of earth emerging in a young yin yang universe.
The puppies have just opened their unfinished eyes
to a reality they’d only known with the touch of their pink paws,
the suck of their pink mouths,
the warmth of their mother’s wideness.
Their eyes are raw, unaccustomed to the light that watches them;
they are a milky dark blue,
dense coalescences of a deep midnight hinting of nebulae.
Their eyes will lighten as they grow,
to blue or brown I do not know.
Soon they will see space as a place to play.
They can barely walk, and their weakness is a precious thing.
Nova is proud of her pups, and loves showing them to me.
She follows me around, and lets me into her litter.
She knows which of her children is mine,
and she has given me blessing to take Waldo when he is ready—
she licks his baby crotch clean while I cradle him.

It is because I love the puppies that I would be the first to find Infinity’s body.
Let me paint a picture of Infinity
as he lays dead by his dog’s stardust.
His light blue eyes are wide open.
Once again, he is not seeing what they are staring at—
He’s seeing, once again, something far larger.
It is not his first time dying,
and not just because of all the bufo he does.
When he was my age, he crashed his motorcycle and died.
He was somewhere else before he woke up
in a white operating room.
For a long time he did not remember choosing to be a miracle,
to live again with a dead name, a dead stomach,
and one dead leg buried.
Under the weight of a dead name he wanted to kill himself,
for a long time.
Eventually he learned he was Infinity,
and has chosen to live many good years—
do not try to tell me that psychedelic drugs are bad.

Infinity has a third blue eye—
it also stays open in death.
It is ornately tattooed on his forehead.
That is something else worth mentioning about Infinity—
that he has has face tattoos shouting around his skull.
He still smells like dust and Dr. Bronner’s.
He lies still in his dirty tank top with the picture of Jesus
Which reads “I never said that.”
Out of his brown cargo shorts sticks a little more than one leg,
his left leg upon which he hops around on bare foot
grounded in the world he chose to stay in.
I once massaged that well-used leg, mixing oil, dirt, and love.
It was all he asked for in exchange for the full body work he did for me;
that is the kindness of Infinity.

The puppies would mewl, and their mother would give.
Their infinity is just beginning.
Upon finding Infinity’s body, I would mourn,
but he would not want me to mourn too much.
I would think of what he said the night before,
“The universe is playing hide and seek in us.
Be sincere, but never serious.”
And I’d laugh out loud over his corpse, sincerely, softly.
I’d think of how we’d discussed letting him stay with us,
and how lucky we were to trust.
I’d think of the self-love he’d taught us to teach ourselves
in the mirror, and in each other;
I’d think of Waldo, and finger the beautiful blue stone around my neck
which Infinity copper wire wrapped for me to wear.
And I would say, again, for the hundredth time in 14 hours,
what he had taught us the night before to say to our eyes in the mirror,
to the eyes of our friends as we sat gazing into one another:
“I love you.
Thank you.
I love you.
Thank you.”