A pair of doves had come to stay with us. I first saw them together on the wires behind our house, wires that serve as branches might if we had trees. One of the advantages of wires as branches is that one’s view of the multitude of birds that frequent my neighborhood is unimpeded by foliage. I tell myself such as I procrastinate about planting the tree that I have been thinking about planting in the back yard for some years now. Doves mate for life. If one flies off the other follows. They perch as though joined at the wing. When they descend to eat some of my next door neighbor’s birdseed, they seem never to stray more than an arm’s length from one another.

I watched these companionable creatures as I took a break from mowing the other day. Their presence comforted me; then, suddenly they flew away in tandem as a squirrel scampered upright along the wire towards them. As the doves flew away, the squirrel lost her footing but caught herself and scrambled to an upright position again only to lose her footing a second time and scramble hand to hand along underneath the wire upside down. She then quickened her pace and scurried the remaining twenty or thirty feet to the pole across the alley, clambered off, perched on a thicker wire and scampered down three houses length before disappearing into the foliage of a neighbor’s big oak.

Later I seemed to see a dove return alone to my next door neighbor’s back yard. I worried that its mate had run afoul of one of our neighborhood’s many feral cats. As these thoughts began to take shape in my mind, my first impulse was to return inside and grab a note pad to jot them down. But I needed to finish my mowing. The sky was suggesting rain in the offing, and besides, if I remained outside for a bit I could watch for the other dove’s return. After I had finished my mowing and returned to my study I wondered vaguely if I had just been vouchsafed a lesson in providence? Scripture tells us not a sparrow falls outside God’s providential gaze. Was the hand of God evident as a rascally squirrel saved herself? I don’t know whether pairs of doves love one another—in a Thomistic sense they must, I think. Does the abrupt decease of a beloved bird, killed by an unwanted cat perhaps argue an absence? The second dove did not return, and this morning I see the remains of a nest on my neighbor’s garage roof.

I think I was forty-two when it occurred to me for the first time forcibly that I might not live forever. Like Freud I can’t imagine or think of not being except as a general concept devoid of content. But my new awareness was the perception of finitude, of living a material, concrete life detached from any surrounding cosmic stew. For some years afterwards I thought about death a good deal whilst behaving in ways that amounted to classic death denial as Becker describes it. “Know thyself first immortal,” says Chaucer’s Scipio Africanus. I had long ago given up on the consolations of my religion, but some great economy or philosophers’ heaven still might offer a malleable future pregnant with unforeseen possibility, a sort of rational reconnection to the cosmic stew that might replace the paradise I had lost.

Or so I thought. Now the future is much shorter. I’m no longer preoccupied with the grand scheme of things. To the extent that I think about death at all, I think of it as a particular occurrence that I expect to interrupt my material life in a way and at a time I shall not choose. I have just read the obituary of a former colleague who died at the age of eighty-four, a catalogue of his good works and accomplishments and of the many honors that had come his way in life. I knew these already, but seeing his age at death I noted that he had seven more years than I have now. The thought has an edge, but as I search my awareness I find no grim reaper wielding it like a scythe. If there be a grim reaper, I am oblivious; and I am faced with the same question that faced me half a life ago: what is to be done? My answer for the moment is to finish my own mowing and to watch for the dove’s return, not as a presage of some postdiluvian blessedness but as a sign of my own hope of present continuing.

This perception discloses to me other concrete and homely truths. Recently, I discovered Wendell Berry’s wonderful essay, “The Two Economies” and continue to enjoy its resonance. Just yesterday, as I listened to a sermon on providence I thought the real question isn’t whether God is able to (or cares to) help us in our trouble, or even whether we live in a cosmic commonwealth that is self-aware and desires the well-being of its constituents, but rather how to be, as the self-aware creatures that we are, when faced with our irreducible finitude. We live in a place where death surrounds us, is as commonplace as it is inevitable. Our lives bear themselves towards death no matter what we wish or will. The real problem with the denial of death is that it diminishes the future, as Berry puts it. Somehow, in a way that I shall never understand, my ability to be at all is dependent upon my very partial apprehension of not being.

Which in turn discloses to me some large goods that are present to my given life. The economy of these large goods tends to remain balanced of itself, though we humans may upend it. Berry reads the parable of “a certain rich man,” told in the twelfth chapter of Luke, as follows:

He is prepared for a future in which he will be prosperous, not for one in which he will be dead. We know from our own experience that it is possible to live in the present in such a way as to diminish the future practically as well as spiritually. By laying up “much goods” in the present—and, in the process, using up such goods as topsoil, fossil fuel, and fossil water—we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay.

Berry’s purpose in this essay is to lay out the grounds for a comprehensive ecological or environmental ethics, an honorable purpose. Mine is more modest.

Though I fear the loss of the doves whose presence just now graced my back yard, I continue to await their return. My waiting contains the hope of tomorrow that is my will to live whatever may be the measure of my life. And it contains as well the somewhat uncomfortable knowledge that my life has a measure. I continue to love my beloved, my children, my friends. I hope to remain charitable, to be generous—perhaps I may still write a few more good poems, publish another small book or two. Perhaps students will continue to welcome my conversation for a while. But I shall erect no grandiose monuments to myself nor seek otherwise to write my name in the heavens. As I resolved to continue my mowing I recalled a couple of favorite lines from a poem by Robert Bly. It’s called “Black Pony eating Grass”:

In a few years we will die,
yet the grass continues to lift itself into the horse’s teeth, . . . .

It isn’t just that my days are as the grass that withers, as the psalmist put it. The grass continues, the horse eats, and I witness—all of us bound up in the bosom of death, the edge of the world, the teeth of the horse, the boundary of time and of timely things.