Beggar's Cup
Jack¹ Myers

I'm slowing down now, 
 imperceptibly（细微地） , it seems,
 like a river spreading itself out into a delta（三角洲） 
 where the minute metallic² taste of salt, like paradox（悖论） 
 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（不顾前后地） 
 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 ego³ breaks down
 into a pile of pick-up sticks,
 before my final dispersal rolls in on the swell⁴
 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 dismantle⁵ and carry off bit by bit
 the fragile sense of unity⁶ 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.