It feels as if you’re being given an extra life to live.
—Dara Barrois/Dixon*

Or maybe it’s the third or fourth or hundredth chance—
you’ve lost track, as you should. Doesn’t matter.

It feels as if you’ve been given an extra life to live,
granted a reprieve or been excused from duty.

Perhaps you were pulled back from the precipice.
Or, shoved over the edge, you have clawed

your way back up because (and you know this now)
someone up there was waiting for you,

calling down encouragement, or offering a hand
to help pull you back among the living.

Because you thought you were dead,
or about to be. You thought you’d never survive.

Maybe you didn’t want to. But you did.
And hey, it’s not that you owe the world anything,

that you “learned your lesson” or now you’ll
do things differently. But you can, if you want.

Your one wild and precious life has been extended,
and you don’t have to know how you’ll live it.

All you have to do right now, just this minute,
is to walk or roll or crawl to an open door

and, like the dogs, sniff the air and get yourself
outside. If there’s sun, close your eyes

and look up. Smile. You don’t have to say it—
the thank yous will ooze through your pores,

or raindrops will tap dance on your sweet face.
It doesn’t matter—it really doesn’t—how many

days or months or years you have left.
You have them, lucky you. Lucky us,

we who get to love you a little longer.

•••

* Dara Barrois/Dixon—the wife of the late poet James Tate—said this about compiling her husband’s poems into a posthumous collection, “Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate.”

And with gratitude to the patron saint of poetic wisdom, the late Mary Oliver, for her oft-quoted phrase, “your one wild and precious life” from her poem, “The Summer Day.”