Born in a year, died in a year, we’ve become to the living stones,
stars, markers, their neighbors’ Cadillacs,
trophies of old friends and loves.
They take our lives, cut and paste pieces,
do their math with our times:
thirty years from, this minus that,
spread us before their castes and rolls.
When they read obituaries or blurbs,
our lives as electricians, novelists,
point guards, bombardiers,
they rarely stop to consider
a possible completeness
apart from their ends to come.