Medical Narrative:

Rituals

She lies on the hospital bed next to the stilled body,
murmurs I love you, darling…I love you, darling,
kisses his cooling cheek over and over.
Their two adult daughters hold hands, perched
on brown folding chairs, every fiber straining
toward them.

And though I recognize the skin’s wax-pallor,
I center my stethoscope on his chest anyway,
where the lub-dup, lub-dup should be

but isn’t. All the air squeezes from the room
as they wait for me to utter what no one ever wants
to hear, those seven little nuclear bombs:
His heart has stopped—I’m so sorry.

Back at the nurses’ station, the wife
sits across from me as I call the doctor.
Pushing the cottony curls from her face,
she begins the new widow’s ritual:
reminiscing about the deceased.
How they met in high school,
together over sixty years.
The wonderful father he was.

When she sobs, I can’t imagine life without him…
my stomach tightens, a sure sign I’m slipping
into sorrow’s thick bog. But no. I can’t.
The mortician’s coming and there’s paperwork
to finish. I have to phone the organ donor hotline.
The ER is calling report for my next admission,
coming soon as his room’s been cleaned.

 

*This poem is included in my forthcoming collection, “Standing in Their Fire.” A version also appears in Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Vol XXI.

Memoire:

In this Strange Light

Outside in the dark on December 21st, 2020,
peering at two conjoined planets at zero degree
in the sun sign of Aquarius, I’m awash in want—

to see the past year end and take with it all
of sorrow’s plagues. But on this winter solstice,
as the sun stands still, I won’t shed tears. I refuse

to name catastrophe, even one more time.
I want the light to return. I want to know
something can be built on these terrible bones.

Saturn and Jupiter star the western sky—first time
in seven centuries. I’ve still so many parts to shed,
memories to dismember and things to uncling to,

like my father’s bones, resting in the burgundy bin
the crematorium placed him in fifteen years ago.
Maybe I’ll finally bury him under the ginkgo tree

I bought then, waiting in its plastic planter.
But right now, I feel undefined, containerless
as sifted ash, am drawn to curl inward.

Who will I become, then, in this long turning
of seasons? I don’t know how to enter the womb
of mortal darkness, or what it means

to become chrysalis. But in this strange planetary light,
I imagine the molecules and minerals of my father
ascending tree roots, become shining stem and leaf.

I feel the movement of stars; the seeds of celestial
mysteries sprouting in this night’s reflective shadow.
A sudden meteor streaks across,

divides the sky’s black. In the lingering smoke trail,
a small, tenacious rising begins within me:
something I’d like to call hope.