Sun Kil Moon - Chapter 87 of He lyrics

At Oceana Apartments, a breeze arises
Blowing in from
The Pacific the balcony doors are open, and
The salt sweat scent of the sea is
On his skin, and on his lips
And in the air that he breathes his senses
Are more acute since he stopped smoking
Chesterfield, his brand of choice
Provided the finance for The Stolen Jools
And he and Babe generated some income
By advertising Old Gold cigarettes
Although he could never smoke Old
Gold himself either way, the tobacco
Companies made their money back from
Him a thousand times over

And now his is an old
Man smelling the world anew
Lois, his daughter, calls him on the
Telephone he enjoys hearing from her
And loves spending
Time with his grandchildren
He could, perhaps, have
Tried fro more children of his own
But he chose not to his daughter is
To be his sole such blessing
Ida says that she always knows when Lois is
On the other end of the telephone he
Does not even have to speak her name
Ida can hear it in his voice
And see it in the expression on his face
Before I die, Ida sometimes says
I wish I could witness
That expression on your
Face just once when I call if your
Tone is anything to go by
Your face won’t look like it does
When you hear from Lois
He always hushes her if he is an a bad mood
He tells her that she
Sounds like Anita Garvin or Vera
Although he only thinks this and
Never utters it aloud

He will die soon he knows this
On some animal level he
Does not mind dying he is not afraid he will
Miss his daughter, and he will miss Ida
But he is
Now discarding days like small bills
Until all are spent
Disposing of the hours by writing
Letters and waiting for strangers
To call he is excited by
New deliveries of stationary
With the Oceana letterhead in another life
He might have been content to run a
Stationary store
With ascending grades of material
From the cheapest to the finest
And even the poorest
Stored carefully to preserve it
From damp stains he
Retains a small stock of expensive cotton
Paper, which he uses sparingly he admires the
Randomness of the watermark it bears
So that no two sheets are alike
He has always been
Ambivalent about unpredictability
About disorder
He tried to impose order upon his life
And failed he resisted the imposition of
Order upon his art
And succeeded in both spheres
Of his existence
He ultimately embraced chaos

These are the subjects about which he thinks
When he is alone at the Oceana Apartments
He is not sad about the imminence
Of mortality he feels that
The purposeful part of his existence
Ended many years ago, and the best part
Of it concluded with Babe’s death he
Has never been a particularly religious
Man he and Babe had this in
Common reincarnation appeals to him
But only if he can retain some memory
Of the mistakes that he has made
In this life and therefore only if he
Can retain some memory of Babe
He does not trust in

Reincarnation alone to reunite
Him with Babe he does not trust
In reincarnation alone to reunite
Him with Babe
He does not trust in reincarnation alone
To reunite him with Babe he does not trust
In reincarnation alone to reunite him with
Babe fate, perhaps, but not reincarnation
Because it
Was fate that brought them together
These lives entwined like lovers’ limbs