If you’re rich enough, it’s called renal failure.
If you’re poor enough, it’s just a cocaine overdose.
NaPoWriMo #9: The (Not) Same Thing
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If you’re rich enough, it’s called renal failure.
If you’re poor enough, it’s just a cocaine overdose.
Day 8 of National Poetry Month.
And we are saying, “I think…I think I could…”
Lament by Anne Sexton Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole. I think... I think I could have stopped it, if I'd been as firm as a nurse or noticed the neck of the driver as he cheated the crosstown lights; or later in the evening, if I'd held my napkin over my mouth. I think I could... if I'd been different, or wise, or calm, I think I could have charmed the table, the stained dish or the hand of the dealer. But it's done. It's all used up. There's no doubt about the trees spreading their thin feet into the dry grass. A Canada goose rides up, spread out like a gray suede shirt, honking his nose into the March wind. In the entryway a cat breathes calmly into her watery blue fur. The supper dishes are over and the sun unaccustomed to anything else goes all the way down.
or, Notes On The Experience of Reading Fanny Howe’s The Needle’s Eye While Watching My Wife’s Father Die And Being Reminded, Perhaps Unavoidably, of Rilke’s First Duino Elegy ~~~We arrive to wait and watch. He lies, gape-mouthed and gasping, flinching, wincing and moaning intermittently. ~ We go and we sit in the room and we watch the man die the man dying the dying man We watch him breathe. We watch him stop breathing. We watch him start breathing again. ~ We watch him wince and moan and flinch and wheeze and we listen to his lungs gurgle and at some point— as his eyes open less and less, as the words leave his mouth for good, as the food and the water enter his mouth less and less and eventually stop their entering entirely—at some point, watching someone die changes into something else, changes into something harder. At some point—if the dying takes long enough—watching someone die becomes watching someone not die. ~ She says, The end of life is hard for the living. ~ He says that room back there (waving towards the bathroom off his room) must be hotter than this one because he can see a white… (gestures—fingers fluttering, hand moving side to side)…a white… (mumbles something and…). Quiet. Breathing. ~ “A person can feel the impression of a soft body of air indicating presence or further life on her hands or arms or anywhere, sometimes in stillness and safety, and understand that the entire universe is held against her skin in an equilibrium that holds her steady for her life span. Too great a sense of the tremendous explosion of creation in which we live would obliterate us. We feel what we can on our skins and through its porous cells into the nerves and bones where our reckless and pathetic ancestors carry on.” ~ He says he can see steam rising from his feet. ~ “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.” ~ He says there was a woman in his room wearing a peach dress (Did you see her?) and holding a basket in front of her. ~ “One thing surrounds you in parts, drops of sunshine, or shadows, and these vaporous gods live on after you are gone. But wait. Where have I seen that woman’s face before? Why did she pause at the door as if she knew me? She is folded in smoke from the crematorium over the hills there.” ~ She says that her mother's favorite fragrance, White Shoulders, has been in the room since the day he arrived. ~ “ ‘The trick is to follow the clue, to see the chance connection, attend to it, and against all reason, follow it to the next clue, or coincidence, yes, if the reading at Mass echoes what you were thinking about in the night, follow that message out into the streets, and the next, follow the coincidences.’ “ ~ I don’t believe that my dreams are prophetic. I don’t think that they are trying to tell me anything. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t listen to what they are saying. ~ The nurses come and they moisten his lips and the inside of his mouth with small disposable sponges on the end of a stick which they dip into the cup of ice water that he is no longer drinking. ~ His lucidity slips but his slips are lucid His lucidity is slipping but (t)his slipping is lucid. ~ A movement catches my eye. It is his foot twitching, under the volunteer-crocheted afghan. But when I look up from my reading, I see there also the child’s foot, my daughter’s, like an echo, she in the recliner that already he has stopped using just beyond his bed, the two of them in the same basic position, her mother—his daughter—between them in a chair, the mirror of time reflecting both ways and al(l-)ways changing—age and youth, the mother— his daughter—between them, between him and his daughter’s daughter. ~ “She was born on a rise in time facing two ways.” ~ A woman—another dying person’s visitor—sits in one of the sitting areas reading a magazine and I notice the title, “Sophisticated Living.” She does not look sophisticated. She mostly just looks like some thing is being emptied out of her. ~ Hard shadows and soft shadows. Near and far. Light from the window falls through the blinds and across my foot and onto the corner of the bed which doubles as a socket for I.V. poles. ~ Always there is one thing ending as another begins. ~ All positions are transitions. All positions are transpositions. ~ These things begin to get as confused as he is. but….is he? Perhaps these things only begin to sound as confused as he does/is/seems. Is he confused or is it his or our reality that is confused? ~ Which is harder, watching him die or watching him not die? (All quotes are from Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye, Passing Through Youth except for the passage begginning, "Who, if I cried out...", which is from Rainer Maria Rilkes First Duino Elegy, Stephen Mitchell's translation)
so many more roadside wreaths out here where youth have so much less to do and yet so far to drive to do it Shadorma November, Day 7 (six days late....) (...or does that make it five?...)
We do not touch our dead anymore. I touched my dying mother. I could not touch my dead mother, though I kissed them both. I turned off that awful pumping machine that kept the air in the mattress that kept her as close to comfort as one can get when one is dying piece-by-piece. The machine gave its halting rhythm to the slap-dash ritual of getting her home before it was too late to get her as home as one can get. I remember turning off the machine, pulling the first wracking sobs, and welcoming that finality for her. The machine is dead. The motor has stopped. There is no more. Now, we cry and drink. We lost the depth from our bones when we tossed death from our homes. We lost the power of the touch of that darkness-tempered acknowledgement of unknowns. We need those worms in our souls or we rot, un-composted.
(damned soundcloud. I've been waiting for 45 minutes for this to "process." It was done on the 8th. I swear.) Three Facets I. It is strange to place a smell that has been so long lost to memory, to realize that you did not feel its missing until you found it waiting for you, a breath of absence in the room that clings and orbits around you and the dying dog. It is not yours. It is not a gift. It is left for us by the living as they leave. II. It is strange to come across a thing waiting just here for just you to find its missing at this right moment, next to the kiss that you placed on your mother’s brow when you asked her if she wanted to go home to die. These are not things that I can understand. They are the same life. Their deaths smell much the same no matter who does the dying. III. It is a strange place to find yourself, on this bare floor between these two like epigraph and epilogue, both ends and both beginnings, simultaneous and arbitrary bookends, heavy with hollow. Who could have guessed that you would find your self in this simple act, waiting for you to tell it apart from where you found it? A trio of haiku sonnets