Winter Storm Warning

Jeannette de Beauvoir is a novelist who happened to write a poem and fell in love with the genre. She lives and works at Land's End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Wild Violet, ZINDaily, Grande Dame Literary, The Raven's Perch, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI's Poetry Sunday, and is the recipient of the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com

I have been in too many cemeteries, read
too many headstones, wept with too many
grieving stone angels. You must understand:
I’ve often thought of killing myself.
It’s a long and honored tradition.

I live in a place they call land’s end:
I think a lot about the beyond. Beyond
the sea horizon I look at every day; beyond
how we experience the waves—
of water
of people
of ideas—
and whether they’re a saving hand

or an undertow. Beyond that thin veil
between being in one world, or another;
beyond the myriad ghosts who walk
through our lives, unseeing, wishing only
they had thought to bring less of this world
into the unknown of the next, and I think—

perhaps the present is nothing but a winter
storm warning. A reminder that life is finite
and death is deep and secret and mysterious.
If you believe, it leads you somewhere beyond,
gives you some brighter promise, a place
of light the stone angels already recognize.
Look at their faces:

they know. Beyond this world lies another.

And how you articulate or understand that world,
heaven and hell, the Bardo, becoming one
with the earth, transfiguring into flames,
spiraling into the ocean deeps, whatever your
faith and dreams inspire—beyond all that
is a sea so dark and wild that every crossing
holds danger

as well as promises. And the echo down centuries
of longing, centuries of pain and desire, centuries
of knowing the dragons that await, the warning
that comes back to you one day:

Be careful what you carry with you into that good night.