When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.

--Banksy

Life has been teaching me how to do this lately.

Walt Whitman knew what was up.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood, isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.

--Walt Whitman (1900)

Mozart

It was only fitting that the child prodigy should die
before fruition,
before age stole his verve and dried his mind as a raisin
in desert sun,
before years carved bitter lines, like rivers
into porcelain skin,
before he gave the world all that he had, and was left
without a melody.

Instead he left at the height of an era, his eon,
a Requiem Unfinished;
unheard and unwasted on dying ears.

He surrendered to the earthen enemy, Time,
thirty-five years still young,
as a star crumples on itself, then expands.
It explodes in its cataclysmic
infancy and is lost, having left all of its light so hastily,
forcefully at once.

And then the dark.

--Alicia (2010)