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 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wants to trample to dust this outdated cereal,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.

Love Among Survivors

Charmed by real love

I commit magic in these streets.

Junkies propose marriage,

rapists place jackets over puddles,

rats sweep my floor.

 

Sent forth with real love’s

awkward text

I wave my hand and

buses arrive on time,

pitbulls belly-up,

roaches slit their own throats.

 

Grinning,

arms gift-full,

I step into our story.

Winter Sun

1.

We prayed for this, didn’t we?

Days and days and days

of darkness dampened us

and we lay limp,

our blackwatch plaid flannel

covered with dog hair.

Praying.

2.

Thank God

I didn’t have to tell him how long I’ve been sober

because I know what he’d think: Why

aren’t you better?  Why

aren’t you well?

3.

Finally outside

we pick paper from the crotch of a fallen branch,

shovel old news burst from its plastic tubing,

and consider how little is left

of fresh or green.

Church Basement

True stories, every one.

Here we learn to ease open our hearts

and to hold them open with both hands,

letting something human flow among us –

for the one with the lichen smile,

the one still proud to have blown Chuck Berry,

the one who can argue herself out of everything

but the first drink,

the one who knows how to introduce someone else’s

urine into his bladder,

the one who ran over his baby.

Here we hold our kin with a hard affection.

Here love is a verb, active, transformative.

Once more, with feeling

Starting with an old one about a pivotal 6 months in my life. I always consider changing the title of this – but I like the thought that the purpose of deer might be to surprise us with sudden grace.

 

double-rainbow

The Purpose of Deer

“I can understand God’s purpose for most animals, but what is the purpose of deer?”  Julie at Lake Alice

I. April, 1983

I carry my knees like broken sparrows to Garth’s kitchen.

Garth whirls up milk and honey for ulcer burn,

picks gravel from knee meat, bandages elbows.

I beat out droning Saturday morning litany:

don’t know, can’t remember, never saw before . . .

I have stopped even pretending emotion;

I’m no longer shuffling that old dance.

I am a single mechanical note

sounding on the the current of that hot juice.

I am beyond shame or gratitude,

beyond the whole writhing maggoty mass of my humanity.

I have leaped clear of the wreckage of heart and mind;

I hang suspended above it on an amber thread.

Wrist scars, cigarette burns, childhood bruises,

all B & O railroad quaint from this height.

My hated father and I have never been so alike or so separate;

we are identical objects under glass.

this is completely predictable tragedy

in glaring black and white.

The buzz saw edges closer.

Cut to the heroine struggling.

Her mouth opens, but you hear nothing.

II. September, 1983

The ripe moon of this season exposes

real heroes without names

riding in and out of my white rooms.

I claim to be rebuilding myself,

stretching my limbs at this transformed barre,

but I begin to see the gift

these people slyly leave on the counter

while I talk, talk, talk from the other room.

The gift is a secret about who we are.

It is this.

Clinging to the hem of existence,

dragged by gravity,

logic pointing the other way,

we push upward.

We do not turn on each other like beasts

but share bread and bear witness.

Under the milk-filled moon

we do not howl for the dead,

but dance.