Beggar's Cup

　　Jack Myers

　　I'm slowing down now,

　　imperceptibly(細微地) , it seems,

　　like a river spreading itself out into a delta(三角洲)

　　where the minute metallic taste of salt, like paradox(悖論)

　　blooming in the darkness, takes me out.

　　I can see down the road that someday soon

　　I'll give in to this and with one deep breath

　　dissolve as easily as the memory of splashing headfirst(不顧前后地)

　　into this life has drifted invisibly beyond feeling.

　　Old age always arrives with his two companions:

　　sickness and regret, an old woman says to me.

　　Then come the war stories wearying as her pain

　　which she feels is front-page news to me

　　but is only the door to after she exists.

　　Now, before my ego breaks down

　　into a pile of pick-up sticks,

　　before my final dispersal rolls in on the swell

　　of some never-before-felt feeling that releases me,

　　I'm wondering where my consciousness will go,

　　if after death I'll still be a me, minus the striving

　　and million forms of the fear of dying

　　that's misshapen whatever is left of me

　　because I was so deeply living it.

　　Time to sink back into the world again

　　which, like a colony of panicky(恐慌的) ants, continues

　　to dismantle and carry off bit by bit

　　the fragile sense of unity I once glimpsed of it.

　　Here, I say, with my empty beggar's cup,

　　to anyone who will listen, is what I was able to fill up.

　　It's the joy of simply being. Which took my whole life to make.

　　It contains all that's left behind of me and when I'm gone,

　　everything I am. And it'll stand for everything I wasn't.