ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS:

1. The poem returns to the path of life because that is its ultimate concern. It is not so much about what happens after death per se, nor with what happens before we are born, nor even about the possibility of reincarnation. The poem is concern with the power of sex and primal embodiedness to free us from our egos. In this sense alone does the poem "return" to the path of life.

2. Pleasure inhabits the linimal space between lives either because the poet feels true pleasure is inaccessible to us during our own lives, or because it is the ultimate start (in an obvious way) as well as an ultimate end to us. Perhaps the ultimate start and the ultimate end are one.

3. Pleasure Bay seems to be the place of pure presence - albeit a presence without any physicality. In this sense, it is a "release": a release from the material. But this is a strange and inappropriate conclusion for a poem that seems so vested in the emancipatory powers of physical sex.

4. This is an excellent question. It does not really have an answer that anyone but the poet could answer, for it is a real challenge to the paradoxes that are inherent within the poem. I will venture this: part of the process of becoming free enough to be reborn involves a willingness to relinquish subjectivity and become and object. Engaging in radically intimate and yet radically anonymous intercourse makes "you" aware of and blur the other's subjectivity and your own objectivity.

5. The life of pleasure in the poem is not timeless. It also includes memory, and moments in any life like those on the terrace, those on the bridge, and those in the new cafe. Part of the pleasure comes from writing the poem. Part of the pleasure comes from reading the poem. The interpreter links the mortal life with the moral, religious life and with the mythological because
when the two are brought together - like the bodies of the dead fucking - pleasure and poetry happen.

Why does the poem return to follow the path of life?

Why does pleasure inhabit the liminal space between lives?

Is the bay as far away from mortal life as you can get? Is there ever a fuller release? Why, or why not?

Some figures in the poem are bodies - across the bay - but 'you' seems to be in a state of constant slow motion as a 'presence' moving back and forth across the bay. If the presence of the 'you' is the subject, and the bodies who provide the sexual reawakening are objects in the poem, why this distintion?

The interpretation describes mourners, the Kaddish, and other mythologies. Why this association of the moral, religious life, with the mortal one, where the life of pleasure is the liminal and timeless one?

...After you die
You hover near the ceiling above your body
and watch the mourners awhile. A few days more
you float above the heads of the ones you knew
and watch them through a twilight. As it grows darker
You wander off and find your way to the river
and wade across. One the other side, night air,
Willows, the smell of the river, and a mass
of sleeping bodies all along the bank,
a kind of singing from among the rushes
calling you further forward in the dark.
You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs
Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you
and you make love until your soul brims up
and burns free out of you and shifts and spills
down over into that other body, and you
forget the life you had and begin again
on the same crossing – maybe as a child who passes
through the same place. But never the same way twice.
Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,
the new café, with a terrace and a landing,
frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was –
here’s where you might have slipped across the water
when you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.

I woke up thinking of this part of this poem, which I've known a long time but hadn't read carefully in a while. Yesterday a friend described a sculpture of a body reaching into the sky, and then I woke up with this, especially the last two lines, in my mind. I had other ideas of what I might post here but this is the one on the tip of my tongue today --
The poet describes what happens after death: you watch the mourners from near the ceiling, and observe people you knew in your life, and as your vision for this life darkens, you wade across the river to the other side, where your soul is released from your body through sex with another body, and is transferred and you begin again. "...but never the same way twice." And then the poem moves back to life, to a today, to a present view of this river, "where you might have slipped across the water/when you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay."
The language is full of seductive fatigue for me. A feeling of return woven into the transfer of bodies, the liminal area steeped in release. And the finality (of this particular life) collapsed by bodies pressed against bodies--
A welcome restfulness within the slow motion.
And space -- one person might live their whole life there, another passes through.
And there is a tone which to me means the poet felt it could be this, or something like it, or anything. But something.
It resonates with other mythologies, traditions. But it feels local, very close.
I'm not sticking to a straight explication, but I can't read the poem without seeing the mourners murmuring the Kaddish, the covered mirrors, the childhood loves visited, the darkness on the water, the almost biblical feeling of singing among the rushes, person after person wading across. It could be a broadly stroked metaphor for a life just as it is for time after death. I imagine I've just asked the poet: why does this river feel so haunted to me. And what happens after this. And this is the murmured answer.