Prickly

I have decided he can’t help it. The sickness brings it. 

The prickliness corrals inside the mouth, along the rows 

of teeth--a bitter saliva he must spit out.  

It is his voice, his mouth, yes but misery makes 

a good impersonator.  It stalks, it thins, it frays,

it twists the soul from muscle and bone. 

It moves without heart through its long dogged 

digging in the bowels, both claws soaked with

what flows there, until the nerves, until

the soul itself pulls away from that entire 

sagging beast. 

All this to add a bit more time to life. 

And all the while the evil sickness waits. 

You can hear it swallow with anticipation.

Mornings

Mornings I like to wander among 

a lovely jam of sturdy trees--

oak and redwood, Eucalyptus, others, 
so many forms--anything goes
here at Lake Chabot--the ground’s paved 
with dead leaves, browned from hunger and thirst.
I and my old dog step on their skins 
curled and crisp as fried bacon cooled, 
their juice leached, 
piles of them in mass graves, 
some in single plots, 
all of them bitten and freckled, 
all freely giving back the life they won, 
returning it to the forrest as if loaned to them, 
the life never asked for, with no memory of it.
For them there’s simply a season to shine 
in bright sun and for the rest of time
to wither in deep shade, 
without sap and membrane, 
gone forever without a trace or complaint.
This comes to mind as I step across 
this gorgeous graveyard. 

Asking for help

When he's gone I will stare at the left side of our bed

for days, weeks, maybe longer, and his absence 

will astonish me each time I open his closet door 

and see the orphaned shoes shined and lined

with a two-way stretcher and I will admire once 

again his tidy ways

when he's gone I will forget his grumblings 

and inward leanings, 

the pelican legs slathered and festooned to the bed, 

the anxiety and tears as mettle and firmness 

flow out of him.

I will forget these scraps of the man, 

the lips that curl in fury, 

all will be forgotten 

and in their place there will be silence and air, 

swollen and still. There will be strangeness.

When he’s gone I will only remember the laughter 

and pillow fights, his 40th birthday, his cummerbund flashing. 

All things I have trouble remembering now during 

this long endurance, this slow annihilation, 

these long days of our misfortune.

But when he’s gone, I will be asking for help--the coming

desolation can’t be lived alone.  

When he is gone, I will think of his confiding eyes,

they were my heart's oasis.

It's illogical

A machine keeps him alive now that his kidneys

will not and he endures it all without a mother 
(she would have nursed him like no
other) but he has me and he has the machine, 
both second best but we keep him going,
all by the force which has a way of pushing 
life through the odds, the cracks, just look 
at the flowers shooting up from the patio fissures 
(I tell him that on his bad days), 
just look at those blind bats that catch a meal 
in the pitch of night deep in the distance,
how they follow the echo, or the mushroom 
that explodes overnight in the junkyard. 
How life abides, goes on by the grace of that
generous force, how it stages its comebacks, 
how it abandons reason and just drags on 
stubbornly, flying in the teeth of it all.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, 
day and night, shall not cease.

The movie

There is a pointlessness to it: walking 

past your old bedroom each morning
--I don’t want to make too much of it,
the young are designed to fly the nest--
but every morning the sun lifts over 
the hill outside your window and casts 
the shade into a silver screen of sorts 
and so I lean against your door 
to catch the flick--a trailer really, 
content to play in this room only-- 
of everyday moments, nothing too dramatic, 
jumbled days all, but what a movie.
It always knocks my socks off.

An act of kindness

Let's say you are the widow's middle child

still in Heide braids when you first hear 

goose steps in your town.

Let’s say fresh out of school the Luftwaffe 

offers you a good job, they mention travel. 

Let's say you ride in the back of the Mercedes-Benz

Transformable Torpedo, behind your boss

and his driver when the gates open

and transparent beings pour through the camp 

like rushing water, drenched as if they had risen

from the ocean floor.

Let's say sleep comes and goes that night and 

the next morning you place your breakfast

on the window sill and turn your back 

and when you look again the plate is gone 

and you feel relief that a ghost has eaten 

and you are not arrested, your 

giving hand not cut off. 

Let’s say the next day you repeat this act

of kindness and later when all is over, 

in the dark of night you grieve because

you did not do more. 

And let’s say what was not done 

becomes the story in your life

and your life is a protracted mourning 

for it, for what was not done. 

Sailing

Yes that's what life is like, isn't it?

Like sailing alone in a little boat, 

in fits and starts on a landless planet 

relying on luck and karma for aid,

sometimes our mind and mouth 
yanked open by (or in cheerful ignorance 

of) the killer tendencies all around,

sometimes sitting stilly under squalls 

with feet kicking the waves, 
lavishing our attention on beauty 
or on perils but soon time again to stand up--

the sails must be adjusted

to these ever-changing winds--and

sometimes we are delirious with 

all that physical effort 

(having to make our own wind so often,

so many lightening quick adjustments)

and sometimes lovely birds land on the hull, 

nervous and a bit shriveled, like us, 

singing under the same shower of stars 

because for them too this voyage 

sometimes seems unbearable, this hunger

for consolation their only constant.