Tag: death and dying

“If You Knew,” Ellen Bass

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

“I Want to Eat Bugs with You Underground,” Julie Danho

The scientist on the radio said that humans
will survive, and, at first, I was buoyed,
but she meant only some of us, the ones
living in tunnels, eating crickets to survive
when the rest had died from mass starvation
after droughts lasted longer and seas rose faster
and wars killed bigger because everyone
wanted what little was left. I’d be fine
with being one of the billions dead unless
you were still alive. Under a down comforter
or by a trash fire, I want to be where
you are. You know how poorly I dig holes,
how angry I get when I’m cold, how twice
I’ve accidentally maced myself and still
you’d take me with you down into the earth,
give me more than my fair share of caterpillar.
Few believe we’re in the middle of the end
because ruin can happen as slowly as plaque
blocking arteries, and only later feels as true
as your hand resting on my hip, both of us
quiet as roses waiting for the bees to arrive.

“We Lived Happily During the War,” Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

“A Secret I’ve Said Three Times and Still Feel As If I’ve Never Told,” Elijah Patterson

I appointed myself the guardian of his breath.
This man, nearly a stranger to me in eulogy,
rasping and gurgling his final days
while I sat at the head of his bed reading
      (a good tribute)
      and my grandmother smoothed his quilt
            and asked if I was ready,
                  and if I was strong.

When she left to wash the same dishes again
      (how important it is to be useful,
      how important it is to be needed);
I apologized to him
for her speaking over his head
as if he were not there.

Hours pass, and positions change,
our bodies follow the hands of the clock,
chairs in the house stops on the dial.
We rotate from his bed,
to couch and kitchen and bedroom–.
And then,
across the room,
I heard it–
      the silence.

He’s quiet now.

            I said, after a longer pause
            than I have ever admitted,
            these three times I told.

And his son said

Good.

      And then–

Wait.

We walked to his father’s hospital bed,
(seven paces).
He pressed his fingers to his father’s silent throat
feeling for the rubbery tube of the carotid,
opened his own mouth–

and then–

      a gasp–

            –bright, upright, lungs full,
            teeth a decrepit grey fence
            with its gate swung open–

and then–

                  a fall–.

And I spoke again to the shape of his ear:

            Didn’t mean to scare you.
            Just checking.

Even though I knew he couldn’t hear.

“Self-Portrait in the Body of a Whale,” Frances Justine Post

We come upon the body of a whale, a fresh beaching.
      It smells like a thousand fishes.      
I crawl in on the carpet of its tongue, seeking the injury out.

      Outside, you cough and look away as I squint
            through the eye at you. I dig into the room
its ribs make and squat in the warm gloom. The heart,

a chandelier, hangs down, ringed with veins. Here and there
      the skin, thinned by hermit crabs, lets in the light
like a stained glass window with blood red panes.


      I lie down on the bed of its liver as the tide fills the body,
            each wave, higher. You give the whale a kick
I almost didn’t feel and gesture towards the dunes,

backing away, disappearing. Is this who you really are?
      This is where I live now like a barnacle,
stern and grumpy. If you try to move me, I will cut you.

“For the Man Whose Son My Son Killed,” Gary Earl Ross

You must understand this: my son
called me after his first firefight,
distraught that he had taken life
when I had taught him to cherish it.
He called me, said he felt weird
and needed to talk to somebody.
Who better than the father who
carried him in a backpack, read
him a bedtime story each night,
and would always love him?
I’m here, I said. Tell me about it.
He did, and I listened, offering
mmm-hmms and yesses and words
of comfort when his voice caught.

Afterward he felt better and returned
to his duties in this dubious war.
Meanwhile, I was relieved he had
survived another day of the insanity.
On his second tour his vehicle hit a
roadside bomb. Bleeding from his
eyes because of a concussion, he flew
to the military hospital in Germany and
later came home. Again I was relieved.
Today, on the first leg of his third trip
to the Twilight Zone we’ve made of
your home, he called. I was glad to hear
his voice. Glad every damn time, ever
terrified your experience will be mine.

Later, when NPR broadcast a wailing
Iraqi father who’d lost two sons in this
chaos, I thought of you for the first time,
wondered if you were that father. It was
purely chance that your son aimed at mine
and mine squeezed off an auto burst first.
Two—no, three fathers in agony because
our leaders are all fools. Still, someone
should recognize your pain. I do, sir,
and so does my son, himself a father.
We are both sorry for your loss.

“Dream Song #16,” Daniel Borzutzky

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    …    Yo no sé!
— César Vallejo

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals
they had programmed and there are blows in life so
powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches
and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the
sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies
and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we
had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we
felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming
through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they
would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our
mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re
dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths
were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J
and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J
and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were
hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving
into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

“Myth,” Natasha Trethewey

I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.

*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.

But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—

I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.