Love

Down the basement stairs my megalomania 

pushes my cheerful family dog. 

Among father's beer barrels and brother’s bikes, 

with pleasure I listen to her bleating and desperate 

scratching, her lunges against the door behind 

which I sit and smile. 

Not until her anguish reaches a piteous pitch

do I open the door to receive her exuberant love,

those wet, whimpering kisses, that earnest scrambling

to crawl inside of me. 

This is the love I crave as a child but find nowhere else 

and so I stage it over and over and over again--

and not only then, but long after with boys 

who try to love me.


I make their love clearly visible to me. 

My brother enters hospice

There’s just me and it, he tells me, 

breaking down again. It feels like 50 below in here—

he cries, he's freezing, 

turning on heaters, adding layers. 

It sits on his chest.  He gurgles and gags, 

he must sit up, he gasps, and then it sits 

beside me on the chair, leaning right on me

—this thing that exiles me too

from my own life. 

The problem is we are so alone with it. 

Not just with it but with his vicious moods. 

We don't believe in perpetual light  

though we long for it, he and I are 

greedy for more of all that's wild 

and not dying.

Then comes his fury 

so profane it breaks me some days. 

Each moment he remembers it, he rages 

against it. 

The problem is I can do nothing but accept 

a truth that grows harder every day 

whenever I look into his unready eyes. 

While I wait

While I wait in the ICU for him to wake, I think about oblivion. 

I think oblivion is only one interpretation, the earthling one. 

The notion of beginnings and endings--a human obsession--important 

for hunting and farming, for invention, for winning, for all human endeavors, 

for the purpose of living on earth without anxiety.  

I think about continuity, the cosmos as hyper-vast web of pulsing 

strings, of interwoven layers of shapes (the bacilli inside him,

my husband, the bed, window, clouds, stars, quasars, black holes) 

in perpetual motion.

While waiting in the ICU, I think about the cosmos expanding.  

The galaxies to my earth eye seem as blooms of light, lanterns 

flashing in the dark, white skin between black holes of fishnet stockings, 

silver fish darting in midnight water, until we look closer, 

deeper into their patterns, down to the layer of atoms and sub-atoms 

where the sublime gossamer scaffolding of air, water, fish, pebbles, 

leaves fan out into an eternity of almighty light and dark--

galactic and infinitesimal. 

Here in the ICU, I wait in a state of bewilderment 

as I consider sizes, distances, spheres, layers, nettings, flashings, 

burstings, orbitings of this beatific and frightening order 

that repeatedly assembles and reassembles.

Stunned

I’ve come to this sense of being


lopsided


and it’s only the end of autumn,


but already


nothing stuns, nothing astonishes


anymore


now that brilliant sunny October and all its


pattypan squash and copper and tangerine


are gone.


Now I am sunk and sinking deeper


into the gloom of winter; the rain which


I longed for is here but it is also damp


and cold and gray, and while I'm happy


for my olive trees-- for all trees--


I'm sad for me--this atmospheric pressure, this


holiday light


and song to get out and buy and do


and meet,


and in the midst of all, their dialysis


and chemo,


the daily cleansing and curing.


It makes me dizzy, at times I feel


I may


lose consciousness.


And then I stroll on the bay trail late


afternoon and there--


a deep red blush of sunset,


a crescent of silver moon,


and the San Mateo bridge crossing


the bay like a thin, golden hair.


And a rejoicing stirs again in me.

Sleep

When the leaf falls in the collapsing din 

of summer light, it doesn’t crawl along 

the ground, lame in heavy breathing for months. 

The leaf lets go of mother’s hand and floats

gently to her grave. Not my old sweet Lab 

who teeters into hers, bowels and backside--

all her senses--in disarray.  I wonder. 

Is it kind to let her find her own end? 

To let her sleep all her days, 

to crawl crippled to her water bowl? 

This loyal friend who trusts 

herself to me as to her own mother. 

She'd follow me unflinching to the vet, 

her eyes allegiant as she slips into that other sleep.

And what would she be missing? 

Sleep is sleep. 

Only her dreams would end.

Loud

It’s like waking up to the short wild scream of the horn

of a distant train blowing and you know that great big

black iron horse is charging this way though still unseen

behind the hill. No need to rush, but it’s coming now, 

the horn is blowing for you to hear--a shrill wheeze in 

the wind, the sound not yet piercing your skull but you know

it’s time to stand up, gather your things, prepare for boarding. 

And the sound keeps getting louder,

like the high groan of yard dogs pulling on their chains

and yet there is a pleasantness there, a kind of promise

when your heart dares to listen. But still, how can you

ever be at ease, how can you ever rest with that horn 

groaning louder in your ear?

Making ends meet

On the playground, the Sisters of the Holy Cross sell little bags

of chips and boxes of chocolate milk. 

Not expensive but more than I ever have in my pocket, 

which is almost always nothing. 

But sometimes I am the owner of dimes, 

stolen from my father’s dresser or given by a fairy, 

so I can purchase a box of ice cold milk, 

maybe even a bag of chips. 

As I write about it now, a half century later, 

I am overcome by the same lightness of spirit 

that follows those first sips,

that satisfying sweetness assaulting my mouth. 

My pleasure seems extreme 

because it isn’t just the flavors of the loot that brings 

exhilaration, it is that the power to buy 

is the ticket into the universe. It makes me part of it, 

no longer she who stands outside it, on the edge 

of the Black Hole horizon, observing the brilliant stars 

around her. Now I have what it takes to belong 

to the beautiful world swirling around that playground.