Sweet Nothing by David Alpaugh

You may take four words with you
cried the Angel of Death.

Why four?
(Already I was giving them grief.)

She shrugged her wings: Seasons,
Winds… Corners of the Earth…
Horsepeople of the Apocalypse…
Not even Euclid fully understands
why Divinity favors that number.
God is nothing if not inscrutable.

Now there’s a word I’d gladly go
into that good night with, I said.

God? We gave it to Milton ages ago.

Hey, he worked hard for it.
No, the word I want is nothing.
I can hear myself chanting it over
and over—through all eternity.

She smiled. Speaking of chanting,
I visited a fellow named Ginsberg
recently. He chose “howl,” “cock,”
“Moloch,” and “OMMMMMMM.”

What do the GREAT poets usually pick?

Their immortal names! Colley Cibber…
Robert Service… Kathryn Kookewicz…
Alfie Tennyson caused an awful stir
when he insisted on adding Lord
which so irked Saint John of the Cross
he proclaimed him blasphemous.

No, I don’t want my name.
I was never that crazy about it.

You don’t have to take all four.
The Zennists always complain
that we offer three too many.

Then I’ll just suck on “nothing.” Roll it
up and down the roof of my mouth forever
as if the stone Death punished Sisyphus with
were no bigger than an Altoid. But, soft—
while you’re at it, I’ll also take “forever.”

She had turned on her laptop and was typing NOTHING
like a DMV clerk checking a personal license plate request.
Alas, it had been assigned to Thomas Hobbes in 1679
after he took his “great leap in the dark.”
And John Donne had dibs on “forever” forever
(along with “ecstasy,” “bone,” and “desire”).

The Dead had scavenged the lexicon,
a few nouns and verbs at a time.
They’d eaten the red meat.
Even the adjectives had been picked clean.
Nothing was left but the parsley:
adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions…

I chose: “up,” “down,” “if,” and “meanwhile.”

Just in case I awoke in a dark wood.