Found Objects, or Clues

Everything you want
everything you need

you already have

as you sleep under a blue and gold quilt
so dearly watched, so warm and stripped of
your waking self

and in the hills just beyond you
in the cold predawn light, diffuse, also watchful,
also blue
air moves, and a breeze
stirs the grasses

that await your step.

The End of This Particular Year

Every morning I
wake up with you
whether you are you
whether you are there

its the click-click-click
the flurried hiss

goodbye to you

the impending dawn.

Tethered

Christine's Barn

They'll move it. Or it becomes someone's barnwood floor.

It will disappear by spring, when we come back. It doesn't matter.

The barn is still there.

Untitled

Everytime I come to see
you, I come in through
a blue door. Everytime I come in, you stand up. You
stay where you are. You put your
book down and tip your head back. Regard. I come in and
you rush to help me with
everything I'm carrying. I come in and you hold up one finger
don't interrupt. I come in and you
ignore it, absorbed, genuine or not. I come in and
you smile, you don't. Everytime I come to
see you, I come in through
you do
you don't
I come in
you don't
I come in
to see you
you already were. You,
already.
You were.

Continue.

The State of the Union

We go up and down, but more often
back and forth. I'm usually forth, and you're back. The going.
I look back but don't go back. You go back. I go forth. We
pick up where we left off. We pick up the thread. The thread is
red. The thread is frayed. We tease it apart. Its a tease. Its a
part of us both. It teases us. I pick it apart. You pick it up.
Sometimes it makes us a little frayed. Then we
smooth it over, and pick up where we left off. For better or worse.
I'm getting better. I'm not as up and down. I'm
less frayed. Sometimes that makes me feel worse. Sometimes you're
worse, or better. I go
back and forth on which it is. You're
a smoothie, or you're a tease, or you're right, its better this way. Its
neither here nor there, in the end. You're there and I'm here.
We're both for better and for worse. Overall, its better. It could be worse.
It would be worse if
it was the end.

Haunted

Without

That Was Us

Wrecked and Yellow

Intent

Sconsolato

It is nothing, I reply, when
thanked for donating you money, or
making you a dinner, or when

asked what true cost the
endurance of all this is. A red bird

crosses my path, shoots like a
dropping bullet of death across my path
down, then down, then down

if I were a bird, or if I continue on
in this fashion
you will never see me like a ground bird, a thrush, a towhee
kicking leaves, making a racket, in the underbrush

if either is true I will be found to
lay across the limbs of trees, up in the trees,
limb to limb, bone to bone, awkwardly,
and embarrasedly, and you'll be pained, but where a red bird
can be free to
shoot his looping call, his deathly flight path,

all over my continued persistence to
speak nothing of myself, the obvious, the death path
and much less you.

Untitled

There were equivalencies
in the weightlessness of
their lives together. A

black-capped chickadee
perched on the end of a finger was
as nothing as the
perfect molted skin of water bug, of some sort,
affixed to a dock and as
nothing as a
sheaf of paper
on a hot and
dry day slid to the floor and on which
was written

I don't know how to tell you this

the airiness of migrations
back to the locations of their exaltedness

in pictures, in writings, in memories of
songs and smells, in all the
places and ways
love makes a mark

did they exchange
nothing for something

or the other way around.

Laramie

I always found you were surprisingly
small even for a woman and I
never got used to the small
and soft and firm feel of you near and on
my body standing up, sitting beside me, in bed though I did get

over the desire to feel the feel of you anymore by the
time we went to Laramie the kind of thing I did
to hide my boredom from you
and myself was to plan trips to places we had to
take a Monday or a Friday off to travel to and the

kind of thing you would do is
believe it and look up
things and become interested and
earnest and academic, and you would
tell things to me you learned and buy books and you wanted
to read Hix, you wanted to
read Arnold, that was the kind of thing you did. The kind of thing I did was

claim to be very busy at work, and
tired in the evenings, when in fact I was
ambivalent about you. The kind of thing
you did when I
drank in Laramie was to sit in the hotel chair
frowning at your Blackberry, clicking, periodically
holding it up to the window, the satellites, offering
to the gods
and they sent
us to an AA meeting
which you drove me to out on route 80
and you waited in the car
without comment
while I finished
my dentist appointment, my haircut, my driver's license renewal

for a few years I could always feel your pulse
or my pulse
when I held your hand
through my palm
and it changed my opinion of you when I
thought it was yours those
days I was more likely to
bring your glass of water
to the table with dinner
and touch you
before bed
when we were in Laramie it was
during those years and
I remember your pulse
or my pulse
holding hands
in a restaurant, in the hotel, in the front seat of the car

I always thought you were unreal because
I was unreal and the kind of thing I did was to
test my theories and do various things
to disappear and by the time
we went to Laramie the kind of thing you did was

to read Arnold, and Hix, and
stare at the glow of
your Blackberry from the bed, in the night, next to me, with my
soured alcohol smell, and heavy sleep, and
unattractive gaping mouth, clicking on

facts about Laramie
and meetings
and directions

and what to make sure to see.

Untitled

a small glass
apothecary bottle
narrow-necked
recovered, possibly, from the
backyard strata

filled with red potion
of unknown origin
something organic, ripe
squeezed in our fists
or the liquid remains
of where your brush rested
after you painted stroke and stroke
of fire, or bridge, or breath

spilling like our
clear-eyed love
spilling on the linen cloth
that says
just so, just this
and absorbs

indelible stain
part of the fabric.

Untitled

When I walked onto the unit the first thing I could hear was the cough. There is always coughing, choking coughing, especially at mealtimes. And in January, and February. I did not expect that sound or his face. His small face with his small eyes, open and unfocused, and his open mouth, coughing and coughing, with an aide still trying to spoon something yellow and pureed in it. I looked at K., who was doing her notes at the counter, she looked at me. We were thinking the same thing. Not yucky cough. Not bad cough. Wrong cough. Terribly terribly wrong cough. We're good guests on the floors. We don't get righteous and we work with the staff. How can they be spooning into his mouth still? Alarm, alarm, alarm. Something wrong.

His whole self feels like it slams me in the chest, at the instant I first see him. I am drawn to him, somehow, I want him. I want him on service. I want him to be ours so I have something I can do. His suffering is immediate and pure. Not quiet weeping in the dayroom after dinner, waiting for an aide to come put you to bed. Not the quiet lying in bed shifted onto one side, with pillows, then the other, with an open hole on your buttock or sacrum, perhaps with foul drainage, but contained, under bandages and sheets, stabilized and you on pain meds so its there and not there. This is active drowning and it is immediate and pure and I am not expecting it and I feel compelled and I can see K. does too.

I know that if you have dementia, eventually you will lose the ability to swallow. Thickened, honey thick, nectar thick liquids. Gray water you can stand a spoon up in. Soft diet, ground diet, puree. Then this. And this was his moment. Mid-meal, the swallow disappeared. No more swallow.

They're good. They realize, call the doctor, an ambulance, send him out. Its not long but it feels like an eternity. I keep thinking, 15 minutes, 20, he will be in the ER, they will suction him, clear what he's drowning in, give him something to make him more comfortable. I am antsy waiting for 20 minutes to pass, even though he's gone, even though 20 minutes may have nothing to do with it.

K. gets him on service. I hear it on report this morning, I go straight there. He is nothing by mouth, he is in bed, he is in a quiet room by himself, hiss of oxygen. I read the chart. I'm so happy he is ours, that I can go to him. He's from East Africa. He prefers to be called by a diminutive name that suits him somehow, is sweet. He's actively dying, of course. He was brought here months ago by family, from there, from atrocities he was victim of. I will write this in my note, later, though no one may read it. To be aware of this trauma, as he approaches death. Of his full suffering, though we'll never really know the all of it.

He speaks a little English, Swahili. I know a little Swahili. I feel hesitant and a little silly speaking it out loud the way I always do in saying any foreign word. I hate saying, Au Bon Pain. Bad actress. I try to make the best marriage of the words I can remember, and what is appropriate to say. What I feel and what I want him to know, and feel.

I am here. My name is B. I am here. It is morning. Its good here. Hello, hello, yes I am here.

He doesn't respond, I pull the covers up to his shoulders, his face is so thin and sunken the oxygen mask won't sit flush on his face for the concave hollows of his cheeks. I stroke his cheek with the back of my index finger. I close my eyes. I smell his smell and I think, this is what he smells like. This is his smell.

I push play on the CD player in his room. He is Christian and fervent. Hymns in English, nice recordings of them. I'll fly away. I pull a chair over so that we are facing each other, in case he awakens, so he can see I am there. I start typing my note. Its misty, raining, green outside. I am acutely aware that I want to stay exactly here until the moment of his death and that I cannot. I am acutely aware of feeling an intense and profound gratitude that I am having this opportunity to be with him like this. I feel love for him. I love to pause in my writing and look at him and watch to see if he is breathing or not. I love to see his face, still and calm, his breathing, him in bed, with soft pillows, soft johnnie, clean sheets, cool air. Comfortable. Now a hymn about for all the suffering I have been through, still there is joy. Something like that. I wonder if he feels like that, now, or ever did. I am not tempted to believe he does, or did. Because maybe he didn't. It doesn't have to be a miracle, a storybook. This as it is is enough, to me.

I finish. I skip the hymns back to the first song so they will play longer, when I'm gone. I think he will be fine. I feel like something was given to me, that I got to be with him today. I did not have to endure not seeing him like this. It was my gift. I speak to him again, Swahili, no less awkward inside about it. I am here.

I think about it. Its true and not true. Its borderline appropriate, maybe. I think its OK to say. I say, I love you. When I say it, I mean it. I don't say it for him, to try to create something, or do something for him. I say it because when I say it it is the truth. It is honest.

I leave. I think about going back, after work, to sit more with him. I do not. I wonder for how long I will keep thinking of him like this. Relief, and humility, and gratitude, and love. How long I will feel this slam in the chest when I picture his face, last week and choking, today, with the hiss and quiet and rainy green and the sound of my typing.

Untitled

I Miss You All the Time

Wedding

The lights are in
paper lanterns, on a string, and
hung from eave to branch

bare arm touches bare arm, and skin
is cool, and moist, from night air, and heads
rest on shoulders and chests, for comfort, for
being weary, and for
missing someone, and hands stray to cheeks
and brows, and hair is
tucked behind ears, and twirled idly, and words
are only murmured

music strays from here to there, carries and
fades, dew collects on the spider webs

remembering is this,
is a literal trap
gray dawn spreads, not breaks,

the faint smell of eucalyptus, and
those who sleep
now flying

gray dawn spreads
indifferent
and turns the windows
opaque with light.

Untitled

the hotel smelled of
mold and bleach and it was where she was
careful, and alone, and on stage, and self
involved and she didn't drop it or raise its
hairy self up in the air and
smash it down on a rock point, hard hard
hard to crack it, split it, with all the satisfaction of a
well-earned split, like a lip, and the dry
smear of blood that leaves, like a feathery
brush of blush on paper, a demo, this is how you can
make yourself up, to look good, to be
pretty, or beautiful, but I digress -

the hotel smells like red wine
on her breath in the morning, from the pores, from
the neglectful way she keeps her clothes, expensive and poorly
laundered, from the way she bangs away at it
without enough conviction
to split it
hairy side from hairy side
clean split
and the white flesh exposed
to eat deliciously into
the clean fluid
coming forth.

Untitled

He thinks it is a philosophical wasteland, a
measure of him and a measure of March
grit under his shoe, to turn his ankle so
and grind it and he forgets, he
doesn't know what he is for and
so again he is an impotent boy in the brown woods with
homemade red woollen mittens, with the hiss and
loneliness of beginning snow, pit pat, and the
house maybe visible maybe not through the trees
the rising stomach of alone, and untended, and the
long strain of his eye and ear for that house ten or fifteen steps
further out, or further in, and
a voice calling to come home, a seeking of the
house, and the mittens, and the no one, and how it can all
be reduced to one grind in the turn of
an ankle, a shoe, a gesture of
conscious intent, the abstraction of bony hands
knitting, knit purl knit, the arthritic knuckles knobbed and brushing the
grit stippled into his palms, and smoothing and
soothing the
reddened skin away.

What Was The Point of That/Retrospect

Burn Through/Persistence

Integrated

Heart

Loneliness I - V

So What About February

Every Monday we start board meeting with a something from the chaplain. Bob read this last week, and I liked it. I don't usually resonate with much of what he chooses to read. Partially because of the point of view of what he chooses, and partly because of the manner in which he reads it. Offhand. We're all business in meetings, but at the same time, everyone's just come in from the field, from living rooms and bedrooms. From the intimacy of fear. And the intimacy of the body, the sick body. From sacred spaces. And I don't think its just the hospice thing. I think everyone is always about one heartbeat away from a sacred space. Every single person eating burritos in the restaurant around you, every single other parent watching their kids with a mix of pleasure and boredom at the playground. No one has to feel it or know it, but there it is. You just have to be willing to point your finger at it, and say, There.

Bob had Bell's palsy last month and he's better, though his speech is still slurred. It warmed me to him. The way he had his eye taped shut and his slurring and drooping face, and the way he bore it without drama, or comment, or anything. He read this is his slurry speech and something about his quiet uncomplaining dignity over the past month and the sentiment of the reading said to me, There. And I was glad for that.



I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

Untitled

On Sunday I drove two hours to the Cape to be there for KP, with whom I went to see Dirty Dancing at least 3 times when we were in high school, whose Dad died Thursday. Whom I remember at her house, when I was young and thin and not sure, how it worked in houses with Dads, and him coming up the stairs, stout and quiet, saying not much, calling her Ka.

I come in and I see KP, then her sister, and then her brother B, and then her mom, and then her Dad, laying with hands folded of course. The whole ride down I wish I could go Monday instead to the funeral, to hear B give the eulogy. B used to give me rides to see KP when she lived in New York, and he was always quiet, and funny, and sarcastic, which I love, and unfailingly polite, and nice. And once he came with us to the cabin and we all went running and he was himself. And he captains a nuclear sub now. He's my age, and KP is older.

In high school I thought I might have a little crush and I let this slip to KP who fixes it all up because B is as fantastically unsure as I am. A brief exchange happens on the bus, was it the bus really, but I think it was, and we are agreed to go to the sophomore dance together.

Nothing was much right at home that year. Did he know or not know? I never have asked. I had no dress and J. gave me hers from the year prior. White and lace and not really my taste but pretty in its right and I was thin enough to get into the size-small dress but too tall, but it had to do. Was I that awkward? I had my hair braided in two long rows, I had always wanted hair that would do that, and mine was always cut awful and short. Forced cuttings in someone's garage, I hated that. It just barely pulled into those braids. I don't know why it meant so much to me that those braids worked out but it did. It was something nice.

I remember B. in his suit, and sitting on leather seats in the back of someone's station wagon. And he was nice and polite and we danced and I was so nervous. I loved him because he was so good. But it wasn't like that either. I remember Pago Pago afterwards I think, and the great big table, and the nice friends who weren't really my friends, moreso his, but all nice to me. He pulled my chair out each and everytime. And I was so awkward and nervous. But I remember that my whole life. The sophomore dance with B., the beginning and end of any courtship, but the beginning of a long association with each other, mostly over the years through and because of KP.

I come to B. in the line up and I shake hands and we hug and I tell him how sorry I am and I think about how I love him, always did. We're a bit part in each other's lives, but I remember him at the sophomore dance, on that run that day, driving to NYC a couple of times I think. A couple of beers and a couple of Red Sox games and maybe a dance party gone wild at KP's one time when Sue, her wife, caught a third wind. We say its good to see each other and I mean it more than that and I think he does too and I can't be sure. But I want him to know, I see you. And I see you lost your Dad and I still love you, always did, always will, in our own way. I remember you and I remember your Dad coming up the stairs from the basement in the house you grew up in.

All week I keep writing this card to B in my mind, what I wish I could say to say I see you, and I see what you lost, and it matters. The comfort I wish I could give and can't. How I wouldn't mind it, if I had stayed late, and everyone had left, and B and I sat in the chairs lining the walls, with his Dad lying there, and if he wanted to put his head in my lap and cry a little, and I would not say anything but keep a hand on his shoulder, and then I would leave and he would leave and I would not be there for his eulogy in the morning, not be there for years, but still be pulling that one thread all the way through. He probably doesn't need me for any of that. But I would have been happy to do it.

Untitled

the truth is I went up, I
went in the truth is how it is at
four o'clock in the morning the truth is the
damp under the sink that you
ignore and the truth is
worthless and failure and the truth
is loved and
not chosen and the truth is a
tiny thread
hanging from your cuff caught
in a fist and
broken by a
snap of the wrist and the truth is
memory what you memorized what you knew
was written before you
wrote it the
truth is all the words are
still mine and the truth is worthless and
failure and the
truth is what you write and the truth is
its not written
and the truth is then you wrote it and the truth is
judgement and the grit on the sidewalks when the
snow melts away and the truth is
worthless
failure
not yet written.

Light

Untitled

A palm placed on a
window always waves
goodbye in the
twilight when you sing a
little song about
is it dark out or
is it light

its always steaming and
leaving your print on the glass an
etching of
where we were

walking home with it
all in your mind
the dusk gone to shade and shadow

lit now only by the
one yellow flower
cupped, in your hand.