Below is my poem, "Almost", dedicated to Caitlin.
Almost
— for Caitlin
i. Silverweed
Silverweed,
also known as cinquefoil, is the symbol of maternal protection of a beloved
daughter, as the leaves will bend over the flower when it rains— Natural
History Museum,
Cable, Wisconsin
Telephones that ring at three a.m.
mean bad news,
yet you must answer them.
You lose
your voice, then find a stratagem,
your shoes,
your cell, your cool, your car keys, certitude.
You must believe.
You mustn’t come unglued.
Don’t leave
the rosary beads behind. Saint Anne!
Saint Jude!
You weave
along the boulevards at blinding speed,
and though you make
a deal with God, you need
to shake
that weighty metaphor for silverweed.
Or break.
ii. The Vigil
You’re in a coma
in Intensive Care.
A portion of your
skull has been removed.
A feeding tube
delivers sustenance.
A ventilator tube
delivers air.
I sit beside you
on a folding chair.
A monitor with
multicolored lines
deciphers whether
you will make it through
as medications
drip into your veins.
A path of staples
holds your scalp in place.
I’m thankful that
you cannot see my face.
June. July. My
fourth novena starts.
In counting off
the decades on your hands,
I meditate on
Joyful number five:
to find my child
as Mary found her son—
alive and well.
And when this vigil’s done,
and you are home
again—as you must be—
when grace drives
out the shadows, you will tell
of how you sensed
the doctors come and go,
and heard You Are My Sunshine in your sleep,
and somehow knew
your mother would not weep.
iii. Off-the-wall
It’s late. Soon I
will yank them off the wall―
these posters
urging one to think about
the selfless act
of signing off on heart,
on corneas,
kidneys, liver, lungs and skin.
My satisfaction
will be pure, perverse.
At 2 a.m., with no
one in the hall,
not caring if they
ever find me out,
I exercise my right
to fall apart,
ask God’s
forgiveness for this venial sin,
and jam the jagged
pieces in my purse.
It’s far too early
yet to know if she’s
to live or die;
and I shall not assume.
The day shift
nurses and the orderlies
arrive as grace
notes trim the waiting room.
iv.
Pena negra
Los
caballos negros son. – Federico García Lorca,
from “Romance de
la Guardia Civil Española”
I will not mince
my words and call it brown,
as in brown study.
No insipid blues.
I will not
misinform with pastel hues
or undertones for
adjective and noun.
The world is
saturated monochrome.
Beyond the window,
trees (I guess) are green
and sunsets golden
as they’ve always been
before this
hospital became my home.
My pen suspends
above a livid page―
an invitation to
incarnadine
its surface with
resentment, ravings, rage.
But red won’t do.
The words that span this line
that runs between
the points of hell and back
can only be
conveyed in shades of black.
v.
Afterwords
I gather up the
get-well cards and flowers
and dress her in
her street clothes, socks and shoes,
then wheel her out
into the summer air.
She is alive.
Alive against all odds.
I’ve chronicled
her unaccounted hours,
for days are
things one can’t afford to lose:
the words tell
how, with nothing left but prayer,
I trusted in a
surgeon’s hands. And God’s.
The little
notebook, thorough, stark, exact,
recounts
procedures, numbers on a chart;
and since the
point-by-point is based on fact,
she’ll never read
of daggers to the heart
or how—amid
disaster—the mundane
and blessed act of
writing kept me sane.
(Hôpital Notre-Dame, Montreal, June, July,
August, 2012)
No comments:
Post a Comment