A magnitude of difference between true totality and ninety-eight percent. Even so, and for only ninety-three, we rushed out after rounds and off the floors and gathered on the roof in scrubs and scrub caps or business casual sharing cheap glasses and cardboard viewers and temporarily forgetting the code just moments earlier— occluded vessels, and an open chest. I didn’t hear them call it, had stared from the corridor at the vacant face, unsure, but […]
oh encapsulated day too small and every meter metered out bland formalities as measures sun in a picture but in this distant window rain the thought again that distance is not mere physics or even physical enough corporal work will teach you that quick
What do you say to a man who is dying? A fact, just as it is twenty-eight degrees out, the sun set three hours and thirty-five minutes ago, this is a man who is dying, but is still alive. Careful, things fall easily here, this the greatest distance, none could be further. What hues in that sunset! A slow burn over the bay, the city changes its face, harder edges of night, but ribbons […]
ICU days line draws and scrawled fishbones sweet jesus overheard we stop at each door each door a threshold sunlight today but frosted glass a curtain drawn for privacy opacity for if it comes to pass this is a shore if anything a great big blank the lung’s secret space and the blood singing wrong
The body fails in predictable ways but sometimes I am still surprised when someone is and then is not
A closed door with a cart outside, coffee service with paper cups, three small apples in a plastic bowl with plastic wrap across the top— a bereavement tray, nothing more to be done. This is the work. Sometimes I get a small, ripe grief lodged in the back of my throat, taut as a grape skin. And what for? I only know that you were. I can’t say any more.
I’m getting versed in the unspeakable: the architecture of a lung, tributaries of veins, and pain, all kinds: white-hot, bone-ache. Removed from all contexts a bruise can be beautiful: pastel, galactic, nascent. The way skin grows up against a suture, shifting dunes. If all goes well, we replace ourselves. This is the brachial, this the subclavian— remember, a life is motion, and nothing less.
In the elevator without provocation a man began to recite all of Rumi’s The Guest House breathless and done by when we reached the top of the hospital every morning a new arrival a task to stay as steely as the stainless doors the same face presented to every floor– closed. Some momentary awareness comes the body also a form of conveyance and pain its sharpest tone
The sky just before dawn is dark electric, expectant. In almost every sense the word progression means progress, except here, at the margins. The sky is blue as airless blood, as secret blood, as all the terrible beauty that I’d rather not know.
Sleet on the way home, the wind’s incisors. What do you say to a man who is dying? I miss the turn for the exit, three times around the parking garage’s flattened concrete helix. I vacate my spot, I leave it wanting. The heart is a door that opens and shuts.
OPTIONAL POETRY 