IT’S 4PM IN THE E.R. AND I AM REARRANGED WITH A SMALL SADNESS
I don’t know what made me think
that life is always less painful
than death as I’ve seen it be,
for the dying.
Sometimes they seem so quiet
surrendered to us, clothes cut off, placid.
Your flooded face, waterlogged and white, they dredged you from
the edge of the river
a whisper of activity still left in your chest.
You came to us bleached, waxen, wet.
Mouth a sickening summer popsicle blue.
Your fluvial fingers, wrinkled just so, to tell us a story
of how you dove somewhere on the other side of the sky.
I don’t know what made me think
anyone could be old enough, worn enough
to not hold their breath through this.
The way we pressed down upon you, hard,
over and over, before
the electric beeps announced your departure.
A declaration of your drowning through the small digital mouth
of a cardiac monitor gone loud, turned silent.
From these things I must learn to turn away,
to reemerge into the world sane, unhindered.
Able to sit on the couch, microwave a golden pizza,
to still feel sorry for myself like people do.
Your death must become nothing more than
a small interruption, a phone call, spilled milk.
I want to apologize for this, but know I cannot.
How else can we resume?
We wash our hands, we drink diet soda, our lungs are dry.
We use the interstate to get home but sometimes it feels
Like I need a passport to leave that place
The customs so different, the locals keep dying.
In ten days I will get $12.50
for watching you leave your life behind.
I arrive home late, I toast to
the breakers and rollers of your hair, the aquatic blueing
in your eyes, now closed. Rivulets of veins across
such a narrow canyon of neck, what delicate bones.
You are a torrent,
a deluge to me, a winding lesson in
tributaries and modifiers, in straddling two places with weak knees.
I am not good at this yet, at removing your rapids from my evening wine,
at taking a shower without some small panic,
at moving between this double life.
The next morning
some sidewalk chalk says:
spirit lead me
to where
faith knows
no bounds.
And I don’t know what spirit that refers to but ma’am
yesterday
you fell into a river and inhaled.
