The Spread - G.N.

The Spread - G.N.

She's slim, wearing silk pajamas, weak, purposeful,

folding paper towels into precise fourths
and setting them on the side of the sink.

With the economy of the dying she weighs 

the need for each word against its cost to her reserve.

She doesn't want me to see this.

She doesn't want her daughter to see this.

She needs my help.

Peeling back the gauze she says

     This is the spread

and for the first time I see cancer.

Some of it has crawled outside of her

and grows there - a mountainous landscape

the diameter of a dinner plate,

red, yellow, raw, oozing, wrong.

Some of it is tenting up the perfect brown skin nearby.

We work together until it is clean and covered.

I pray to see the beauty beyond the horror.

My prayers are answered until I drive away.

Sitting with the Not Dying - MO

No one knows why she's still here.
Three months without food, two weeks without water,
she has become an anatomy lesson:
dark, fixed pupils in an adamantine face,
the cords tying the bonnet of her skull clearly outlined on her neck,
veins running like mole tunnels over her forehead,
feet blackening.

She breathes.
I hold her hand,
read to her from her own bible,
the underlined and highlighted bits,
in the hope that she hears and finds comfort.
She might wish I'd shut up
so she can finish her business of dying.
I don't know.  I don't know.

Sitting with the Dying - EG

Sitting with the Dying - EG

I walk in upon
a relay team of elderly siblings
proficient at sitting and loving.
So easily they leave behind their own tasks,
their sewing and the calls of their grown children,
to care.
I show them how to draw up the morphine
to the lullaby of the tv laugh track

I should draw up their patience.
Instead the bull of my own will
kicks and snorts -
wants to trample to dust this outdated cereal,
this stained white doughnut box holding up the trash can,
this bowl with its dusty chocolate,
a dozen bottles, each with an inch of perfume.

Oh, how I love to do something.

Something To Thank My Mother For

Something To Thank My Mother For

I was born first.

I was the largest, hanging low and heavy like wet wash.

Her mother was two months dead  and her husband in the service,

   so she rode in her father's truck to the hospital.

Massachusetts in January was dark as the grave.

Her fingers had swollen, she couldn't wear her wedding ring.

My eyes were brown at once, oxydized by hospital air.

So the nurses judged her abandoned, me a half breed

   and brought her coffee and smokes.

As for me -

   I was so round, so satisfied, so wombful,

   I slept and slept.

I never woke for food.

I was already left-handed and dreamy.

My whole first year she had to tickle the bottoms of my feet

  to wake me, crying:

Look at this.  Look.

Sublimation

Sublimation

She watches the man as he slices rare beef at his wife's table,

balancing the steel knife in his palm.

Feeling the weight and substance of her gaze returned,

her longing spools out its own story.

Leaving their home she moves carefully,

as if he were not inside her,

as if their musk were not rising like incense,

her tongue not running against the grain of his eyebrow,

his soft thumbs not twinned over her nipples.

At home, awake,

she hums, wipes counters, tends to the dogs,

notes each soft step of a fly on her arm;

quickened by the rapture of her own risen blood.

Shearing Season

Shearing Season

A fleece arrives in a black plastic bag

in a brown cardboard box

and unfolds in one piece

on the porch, like a white buffalo rug

or a wooly afghan.

The street is quiet and she takes her time

spreading the wool in the sun

and rustling out the dust.

The heat of her hands melts the lanolin

which coats her arms and makes them glisten and smell

of the farm far away.

Soon she will make something of it,

but today

being here in the warm animal presence

is enough.

Schism

Schism

How glad the fissiparous paramecium!

When she cracks

she fashions full families

out of her fractures.

When she tears herself apart

she produces a happy proliferation

of her own point of view.

How sad for us

having risen above her,

to have pulled ourselves together

to stand so alone.

At 77

At 77

Coyote has a chest tube

strung from lung to plastic bag,

a ginger colored liquid trickling.

He's prickly and not too clean,

carved down to sinew

and spots and yellow teeth.

He's denned himself in

and doesn't want much company.

I rub his shoulders, feel how

the muscles have let go of the joint.

The nurse comes in and he snarls,

rolling his eyes behind her back

to show me he knows what he's doing.

He's alpha still

through bed rails and morphine;

holds up the bottle

to show me how much he's peed.

The Sisters

The Sisters

The idiot sisters who live in my attic

are keeping me awake again and I want some rest.

They dress themselves in lengths of fabric, pretend

they are in gowns, capes, boas, and tromp around

to some new play they've written. In the midst of this

romance one of them will remember some old imagined slight

and throw herself down, wracked with sobs on the threadbare

horsehair sofa, which reminds the others of the play,

causing the lot of them to shriek in excruciating delight.

To shut them up I bring them gifts of cupcakes, candies,

plates of cheeses and bowls of potatoes over which they coo

for a while. Then the fair one wants to save some for later

and the dark one wants to give some away and the redhead

wants to eat it all now and they're into another awful row.

I even taught them to smoke, a quiet, peaceful hobby.

They prefer cherry cigars, puffing on them dramatically

while they don fedoras and write mystery novels, pounding

away on their old Underwood. Anything will set them off.

I went downtown to get them evicted. I thought I could sign

something, get a restraining order so they would restrain themselves,

but I was told I can't because we're related. So we're in negotiation.

I've hired a mediator. On Tuesdays, when we all get together

I try to calm them down; they try to make me laugh.

Surely

Surely

for Dr. Shirley Martin

based on a true story

At the invitation of the Shah's people she set out

for an adventure abroad taking

10 uniforms

3 pair of good American shoes

2 identical white cardigans

and her mother, who would find clean water,

bargain for melons, and train the help.

Square and blonde she moved briskly

through Labor and Delivery trying to discern

the structure of the system

as women arrived, chose empty beds

and quietly let her know when they were ready.

As the baby came, the nursery girl

would write the mother's name

on its forehead with a grease pencil.

Several times a day the babies were brought

and mothers' names called out.

If there were many Maras, the baby

would be carried from one to the next

until its mother was found.

Some days she would visit the nursery

after her shift, brushing babies' black hair

with her small white fingers,

crooning their mothers' names to them

in a language they would never speak.

Once, puzzled by clean faces,

she asked the nursery girl

Why no names on the babies by the heater?

The mothers had left. They had too many.

Or too many girls.

Her own mother told her to bring them all home.

More realistic, she presented a plan to the Director.

Milk could be expressed, agencies involved.

Fingers making the church and the steeple,

he explained it was impossible.

She never visited the nursery again

but served her time efficiently,

telling herself over and over,

like a prayer sung out in the marketplace:

Surely this one

sliding into my hands

will be delivered.

She Hopes She Is/She Prays She's Not

She Hopes She Is/

She Prays She's Not

She hopes she is;

she prays she's not.

She makes coffee,

drains the pot.

Feels sick. A sign. A sign?

She recalls the lip-biting grin,

the double nod;

imagines them quickened

to a piscean reality.

She turns her mind, willfully,

and still it returns, returns

to that dark pool.

She sleeps and hears waves.

She works and hears little whale calls.

She is a gate.

She is a cove.

She is dumb as a sea cave;

waiting to be startled

by the life within

or the blood emerging.

Still Friends

Still Friends

He is telling her about a trip

he is about to take.

He is leaving out

anything that might hurt her.

Who he is taking.

What he feels.

Why he left her.

His voice is carefully casual.

She nods, smiles absently.

She traces the barely raised ink

of her Pepsi bottle

with an unpolished fingernail,

scraping slightly,

finding no gaps,

no place to begin its destruction.