Umbilicus
“What cha doin’, kid”,
Your living voice spirals over telephone wires.
“Nothing, what choo doin’?”
“Nothing.”
You sound as thin and reedy as a child.
Cancer is rocking you backward, backward,
Undoing you
Soon you will be an infant
Suckling at your mother’s breasts
But they were dry, as I
Am dry, a dry sea bed,
Replenishing my waters by
Drowning in a vat of Brandy while your bones,
Ghastly in hospital whites, are
Busily being devoured.
Faithful to your science god you fear
This is all there is-
That we go clod-like back into the stupid dirt,
Our life force snipped off like some dead rose
Beheaded not by an vengeful God
But by hollow eyed evolution
And the betrayal of your own cells gone amok
I do not want to follow you into the grave;
We do not belong to some ancient tribe
That buries its living wives as
Tribute to their fallen dead.
You’d like to take me with you, I think,
Into the fire that purifies
Not for you the grave with her dark secrets
The moldering body,
The worms that fatten on the scent of putrefaction,
The dissolution of the eye, with its illusion of control
No, you go into the fire,
As you have burned all your life,
Burned brightly, brightly
As if aware you had but a short time
To do all that needed to be done.
As you frantically filled your hours
With the accoutrements of modern life,
Afraid of silence, afraid of stillness, afraid of absence.
During the day, the hospital takes my oxygen,
Squeezes my lungs dry and arid as a desert.
There, I am merely a bit player,
Held together with tenuous wires of tendon and silent screams,
Breaking apart in a high carnivorous wind.
Sinner I am that I cannot bear the dark with you
For it swallows me up in nightmares
Like the nightmares that ate me as a child
Though at the end I will suffer them
As a woman suffers rape
Twenty minutes and a million light years distant
As Andromeda whirls and wheels in my backyard
The umbilical cord between us quivers
And I shiver.
So here I am alone,
As you are alone in your hospital whites,
Each silently telegraphing fathomless need
Over indifferent wires
Our voices a flickering filament of light
In the steepening night
Look Before You Leap
Grandpa’s barn was for the corn
That fed the chickens.
It was dark and musty with
Rolls of yellow piled up to the ceiling
Our job was to shell it, cob by cob,
Young arms would crank
Until they fell off,
Little white sticks
Mute testament to labor
Grains would slide into the bucket
Hissing like snakes
To then be poured,
Sweet and dry and dusty,
Where the golden mound would
Rise throughout winter
Until at last, there was corn enough
To dive into, like seals
On some gold rimed beach
Silvery dust motes flying
In the slatted sunshine
There were rats and snakes
And one year, an errant pitchfork
My sister launched out from the rope
Icarus spiraling down into the sun,
Missing the shiny prongs by a breath
Teaching me anew
All that glitters is not gold and
Look before you leap
Advice that ill suits poets
Who must often leap blind
Into radiance
