when her room filled with daylight, how could she not have slipped under a spell, with him next to her, his arms around her, as they had been, it may then have seemed, all her life?

The air glitters. Overfull clouds 

slide across the sky. A short shower, 

its parallel diagonals visible 

against the firs, douses and then 

refreshes the crocuses. We knew 

it might happen one day this week. 

Out the open door, east of us, stand 

the mountains of New Hampshire. 

There, too, the sun is bright, 

and heaped cumuli make their shadowy 

ways along the horizon. When we learn 

that she died this morning, we wish 

we could think: how could it not 

have been today? In another room, 

Kiri Te Kanawa is singing 

Mozart’s Laudate Dominum 

from far in the past, her voice 

barely there over the swishing of scythes, 

and rattlings of horse-pulled 

mowing machines dragging 

their cutter bar’s little reciprocating 

triangles through the timothy. 

This morning did she wake 

in the dark, almost used up 

by her year of pain? By first light 

did she glimpse the world 

as she had loved it, and see 

that if she died now, she would 

be leaving him in a day like paradise? 

Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little? 

Having these last days spoken 

her whole heart to him, who spoke 

his whole heart to her, might she not 

have felt that in the silence to come 

he would not feel any word 

was missing? When her room filled 

with daylight, how could she not 

have slipped under a spell, with him 

next to her, his arms around her, as they 

had been, it may then have seemed, 

all her life? How could she not 

press her cheek to his cheek, 

which presses itself to hers 

from now on? How could she not 

rise and go, with sunlight at the window, 

and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say, 

of a single-engine plane in the distance, 

coming for her, that no one else hears? 

[Galway Kinnell {1927-2014} 'How Could She Not', from Strong is Your Hold]