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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I Miss You All the Time