Just a Glimpse

This is the poem I got 'The Perfect Table' thing from. I like it:

A Glimpse of the Afterlife
by Chard deNiord

I’m smoking a cigarette and having a drink
with the only woman who’s right for me.
I’m telling her a joke that isn’t that funny
but we laugh anyway as if it were, and then it is.
Ideal forms are everywhere, the chairs
on which we sit, the windows to our left
and right, our risen bodies at the perfect table.
It’s my idea of heaven to be with her on earth,
breathing the air in a smoke-filled room,
drinking tonic laced with gin, listening to the king.
The conversation rises to a deeper level.
She disagrees with me on a matter of religion,
as if religion still mattered in the afterlife,
as if there were no greater joy than to converse
with the one you love about an idea that’s impossible
to prove. I am drawn to her in direct proportion
to the differences of our opinions, ecstatic
to find our bodies have survived in heaven.
There is also time as the darkness thickens.
I retrieve her shawl from the back of her chair
and cover her shoulders which have begun to shake
in the chill of heaven. I have passed from one plane
to the next without detecting the slightest change,
except I know my body lies somewhere beneath
the dirt I walk on now as we leave the bar.
I know the greatest mercy of all is to be with the one
you love beneath a sky on which it’s written:
You’ve died ten thousand times and you’ll die again.