The Mission
Back there then I lived
across the street from a home
for funerals — afternoons
I’d look out the shades
& think of the graveyard
behind Emily Dickinson’s house —
how death was no
concept, but soul
after soul she watched pour
into the cold
New England ground.
Maybe it was the sun
of the mission,
maybe just being
more young, but it was less
disquiet than comfort
days the street filled with cars
for a wake —
children played tag
out front, while the bodies
snuck in the back. The only hint
of death those clusters
of cars, lights low
as talk, idling dark
as the secondhand suits
that fathers, or sons
now orphans, had rescued
out of closets, praying
they still fit. Most did. Most
laughed despite
themselves, shook
hands & grew hungry
out of habit, evening
coming on, again —
the home’s clock, broke
like a bone, always
read three. Mornings or dead
of night, I wondered
who slept there & wrote letters
I later forgot
I sent my father, now find buoyed up
among the untidy
tide of his belongings.
He kept everything
but alive. I have come to know
sorrow’s
not noun
but verb, something
that, unlike living,
by doing right
you do less of. The sun
is too bright.
Your eyes
adjust, become
like the night. Hands
covering the face —
its numbers dark
& unmoving, unlike
the cars that fill & start
to edge out, quiet
cortège, crawling, half dim, till
I could not see to see –
Kevin Young
Tijuana Clinic
I.
Laetrile is Jesus
crushed in an apricot pit.
Belief is what activates it.
Coffee enemas are what the rich deserve,
cramped and moaning
at the end of their line.
“Dear God in hell,” they cry out,
“tell us what to do.”
As though the dying
don’t know everything
already.
II.
Limousined over the pimped border,
through nightsweats of switchblades and firecrackers illuminating
cripples on casters
selling obscene piggy banks—
or would senor prefer a virgin
or a dashboard saint
bobbing its head?—
they come from America, our patients,
to regard with disdain
the miracle radiance
which is not exactly
their fate:
complete remission in four weeks,
at $12,000 a throw.
They come begging us for a change.
With their first-world cancers.
With regret sprouting eyes
in the dampness of their bodies: pain as pain: I smoked, I drank
manhattans, two before supper
for thirty-six years,
but all I really wanted was quiet love in the evenings
and a baseball game on the radio.
They are not lambs,
but captains of industry tied
to colostomy pocketbooks
telling chemo nightmare losses.
III.
American doctors like to wash their hands.
They do it all the time.
But we are a town
trafficking hope, we’re lousy with it,
what falls on either side of the rank,
incurable kind.
Life’s cheapest labor
isn’t lost on us.
Look.
Here is something milled
from the glands of spring lambs in drink.
Here is someone gulled
what a shunt to the heart
which should do very nicely
for the enzyme drip.
A swipe of the credit card—what did you say
your expiration date was?
Death has many ways
of taking us
for everything we’ve got.
Didn’t you know that?
IV.
A cell is a mad situation.
A sidelong glance in a feathered god’s left eye.
An ancient nation
developing.
V.
Fluid on the pleural heart,
lungs leaking filthy honey, they come to us
on their knees, our patients,
with their tax-sheltered annuities
cashed out. Damn the penalties, por favor.
They come sweating like wetbacks
to the old world,
where we have been waiting all our lives
for someone to call us doctor.
Dorothy Barresi
Bestiary
Nostrils flared, ears pricked,
our son asks me if people can mate with
animals. I say it hardly
ever happens. He frowns, fur and
skin and hooves and slits and pricks and
teeth and tails whirling in his brain.
You could do it, he says, not wanting the
world to be closed to him in any
form. We talk about elephants
and parakeets, until we are rolling on the
floor, laughing like hyenas. Too late,
I remember love — I backtrack
and try to slip it in, but that is
not what he means. Seven years old,
he is into hydraulics, pulleys, doors which
fly open in the side of the body,
entrances, exits. Flushed, panting,
hot for physics, he thinks about lynxes,
eagles, pythons, mosquitos, girls,
casting a glittering eye of use
over creation, wanting to know
exactly how the world was made to receive him.
Sharon Olds
Sometimes
1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.
Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.
But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.
2.
Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.
3.
Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
drowse of creation,
when it began to break.
In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.
In an hour the sky was filled
with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.
Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!
The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.
4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.
6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again—
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably—
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.
7.
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.
Mary Oliver
Ontological Necessity
I’d like to bruise this earth
with mental missives until it cracks. If a volcano’s brain
contains each eruption, we too must have these splits,
those dungeon pits inside us.
The harvest is nuclear.
My mouth, an octagon; my chest, an FBI file.
Stem cells grow off my neighbours balcony, fall into my tea.
Cancer paid my tuition. On and on the hurricane
spies and trades. No one watches television
for the stories. Our universe is fresh out of those.
The galaxy yawns and pops pills
Dear Self,
How am I to know if You are still alive?
Test me, you reply
Priscila Uppal
Atlas
There is a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;
Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists
And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds
The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.
And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
U.A. Fanthorpe
Girl Without Hands
Walking through the ruins
on your way to work
that do not look like ruins
with the sunlight pouring over
the seen world
like hail or melted
silver, that bright
and magnificent, each leaf
and stone quickened and specific in it,
and you can’t hold it,
you can’t hold any of it. Distance surrounds you,
marked out by the ends of your arms
when they are stretched to their fullest.
You can walk no further than this,
you think, walking forward,
pushing the distance in front of you
like a metal cart on wheels
with its barriers and horizontals.
Appearance melts away from you,
the offices and pyramids
on the horizon shimmer and cease.
No one can enter that circle
you have made, that clean circle
of dead space you have made
and stay inside,
mourning because it is clean.
Then there’s the girl, in the white dress,
meaning purity, or the failure
to be any colour. She has no hands, it’s true.
The scream that happened to the air
when they were taken off
surrounds her now like an aureole
of hot sand, of no sound.
Everything has bled out of her.
Only a girl like this
can know what’s happened to you.
If she were here she would
reach out her arms towards
you now, and touch you
with her absent hands
and you would feel nothing, but you would be
touched all the same.
Margaret Atwood
Ruin and Beauty
It’s so quiet now the children have decided to stop
being born. We raise our cups in an empty room.
In this light, the curtains are transparent as gauze.
Through the open window we hear nothing—
no airplane, lawn mower, no siren
speeding its white pain through the city’s traffic.
There is no traffic. What remains is all that remains.
The brick school at the five points crosswalk
is drenched in morning glory.
Its white flowers are trumpets
festooning this coastal town.
Will the eventual forest rise up
and remember our footsteps? Already
seedlings erupt through cement,
crabgrass heaves through cracked marble,
already wolves come down from the hills
to forage among us. We are like them now,
just another species looking to the stars
and howling extinction.
They say the body accepts any kind of sorrow,
that our ancestors lay down on their stomachs
in school hallways, as children they lay down
like matches waiting for a nuclear fire.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this:
all ruin and beauty, vines waterfalling down
a century’s architecture; it wasn’t supposed to end
so quietly, without fanfare or fuss,
a man and woman collecting rain
in old coffee tins. Darling,
the wars have been forgotten.
These days our quarrels are only with ourselves.
Tonight you sit on the edge of the bed loosening your shoes.
The act is soundless, without future
weight. Should we name this failure?
Should we wake to the regret at the end of time
doing what people have always done
and say it was not enough?
Patricia Young
Three of Cups
[…]
when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes.
[…]
anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
Marty McConnell
It was my first nursing job
and I was stupid in it. I thought a doctor would not be unkind.
One wouldn’t wait for a laboring woman to dilate to ten cm.
He’d brace one hand up his patient’s vagina,
clamp the other on her pregnant belly, and force the fetus
thought an eight-centimeter cervix.
She tore, of course. Bled.
Stellate lacerations extend from the cervix
like an asterisk. The staff nurses stormed and hissed
but the head nurse shrugged, He doesn’t like to wait around.
No other doctor witnessed what he did. He was an elder
in his church. He chattered and smiled broadly as he worked.
He wore the biggest gloves we could stock.
It was my first real job and I was scared in it.
One night a patient of his was admitted
bleeding. The charge nurse said, He won’t rip her.
You take this one.
So I took her.
She quickly delivered a dead baby boy.
Not long dead — you could tell by the skin, intact.
But long enough.
When I wrapped him in a blanket, the doctor flipped open the cover
to let the mother view the body, according to custom.
The baby lay beside her.
He lay stretched out and still.
What a pity, the doctor said.
He seized the baby’s penis between his own forefinger and thumb.
It was the first time I had ever seen a male not circumcised
and I was taken aback by the beauty of it.
Look, said the doctor, A little boy. Just what we wanted.
His hand, huge on her child, held the penis as if he’d found
a lovecharm hidden in his grandmother’s linen.
And then he dropped it.
The mother didn’t make a sound.
When the doctor left, she said to me in a far flat voice
I called and told him I was bleeding bad.
He told me not to worry.
I don’t remember what I said. Just that
when I escorted her husband from the lobby
the doctor had already gone home. The new father followed me
with a joyful strut. I thought Sweet Jesus Christ
—Did the doctor speak to you?
—No ma’am, the father said.
I said quick-as-I-could-so-I-wouldn’t-have-to-think—
The baby didn’t make it.
The man doubled over. I told him all wrong.
I would do it all over again.
Say—
Please, sir. Sit down. I’m so very sorry to tell you—
No. It’s been sixteen years.
I would say, I am your witness.
No. I have never told the whole truth.
Forgive me.
It was my first job
and I was lost in it.
Belle Waring
