When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
This is one of those deals where the opening line is lifted from the poem to become the title. That’s not the case, of course. This is one those deals where the poem wrote a series of sonnets and the title is the number in which it appears. None of which is terribly important, of course, because if you were going to title this work anything, what else would you possibly choose? It’s all there in the opening line. Everything that follows springs forth from this one simple statement; it is a wish-fulfilment. The speaker is a person talking to what we normally identify as “the love of our life” even though, you know, that rarely turns out to actually be the case. It might be the case here, however, because what transpires from this beginning seems to be an expression of that type of experience we sometimes term “endless love.”
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
This is the opening line of the second stanza and quite efficiently situates the main message the speaker seeks to deliver to the object of affection. The speaker desperately wants to be remembered, recalled and revisited after death, but not at the cost of his beloved’s life. The message could not be simpler: he is entreating her (pronoun use for the sake of convenience only) to keep living a full life in the secure knowledge that until then he will exist in slumber, waiting for their reunion in the great hereafter of eternal love.
I want for what I love to go on living
The third stanza commences with a declaration of desire; a demand couched in the language of a request. But it is not an authoritarian demand. It is a demand in which the stimulus is made manifest. The significance here is that the speaker’s love transcends the earthly domain of possession and the articulation of certain expectations to be met. It would be easy if not downright expected for a person speaking of their own death to place conventional expectations upon the one they love that vary but slightly from those expressed during life: don’t remarry and don’t be too happy. But what would be the point? One is dead and the other alive and if there is only one thing we know for sure about what happens after death—and there is just one thing—it is that contact between the two realms is not possible except in the minds of gullible paying customers. No matter what the reality of the afterlife—whether an endless void or cloud city where the streets are paved with cotton candy—the dearly departed cannot and should not have any influence over what we do. All that can be done is to remember what love is and wish them living a long and happy life.
