What is around me

What is around me is absence. 

It is all around here everywhere.

It is in our bed, it is on the couch.

All around is my need, my want, 

this deficiency. 

What is around me is fear,

what is around me is strange and quiet. 

I wait for his cough, the zipper on his vest, 

the thud of his brush in the drawer.

I hear it all clearly, the absence,

the loud absence of his voice calling: 

El, Going to the kitch? 

Bring me a peach. 

All around me the smoothness, 
the grayness of absence. 

I fall asleep with the absence of husband 

and in the morning when I awake

there it is, smooth and grey and silent,

all around me, I see he is not here. 

At the top

At the top of his headstone


I write, thank you.


Songs of gratitude were the soundtrack


of his life.


Whatever sorrow came to call


could not very change him:


He looked into that murky eye


and chuckled,


Thank you:

Thank you for the high notes,

they made the low notes bright.



At the top of my mind now

this:

When he closed his eyes

that last time and rested his cheek

of white quills on his shoulder bone,

a near smile stuck on his mouth,

as if this were an ordinary

night, an ordinary sleep,

just another dream

with breakfast waiting.



At the top of his merits,

I witnessed kindness, I heard praise

given freely.

Among his last words,

Hey, I like your hair.

A glimpse

I knew it, as we all know it: mean death leans 

against the railings;

in every moment malice mills about;

we don't own these bodies, they are the pod's.

He didn't know, nor did I, which of us 

would go first. 

I guessed, discretely, when I dared to, 

it would be him. 

There were reasons, none gasp-inducing, just that 

he ate more meat, did not exert enough perhaps;

and his men seem to buckle, nor did he believe

all this would clutch him from our stream of life 

but when I glimpsed that steep path down,  

I felt soaked in ice.

Lasting only seconds but when I got a glimpse,

I saw my own headstone, too. 

I saw the end of him and me as the end 

of all the world. 

He was so real, so finished, 

so whole and endless, like the Sierra Nevada, 

like a continent, 

 and if I was wrong about him, 

I was wrong about everything. 

The last tme I said no

There was that night I drove home and saw you seated

on the patio overlooking the San Francisco Bay, 

the lights twinkling above it, all spread before us like a galaxy. 

Then your hand waved a small hello and pointed to the chair 

beside you, unable to speak, your ears so fastened to the radio voice 

and then I heard the UFO talk and shot you a disdainful look 

and walked away. That was a time when you would have loved 

me to say, yes, to sit with you and listen to the radio and speculate 

about Area 55 with cups of brandy in our hands, feeling the night 

press on our backs, the sweet tingling mix of fear and gratitude. 

But that was not the last time I said no to you 

and I cannot remember the last time I said yes, really and truly, yes! 

--that "hurl myself through a pane of glass" kind of yes 

that I could say right now, if only you were here.

I could hurl myself into the stars, into whatever else is up there,

to say yes with such fervor, to hear what you heard on the radio 

and talk with you about unlighted stars and aliens who 

bear witness to our doomed vivacity.

I could learn secrets that might help us now.

A small space

To force me to get him that one forbidden pleasure he still desires 

in this his final year (neither knows it will be the final year 

but we consider it),  

he tells me: 

"It's all I have left in my little life."

He means it literally--his life is shrinking from town to house 

to room to king bed to hospital cot in the corner of our room. 

He has been warned: never salt, never! but he craves sausage biscuists

every morning. He is too thin to be recognized but pleads, Oh come on, 

let me have the damn biscuit. His little life comes up again.  

I wish I could explain how it feels 

to sit beside him who has been so humbled. 

To sit with him in the drive through window of McDonald's 

on our way to the dialysis center. 

To order for him the #8 breakfast: 

Sausage biscuit, coffee, hash browns, a second biscuit. 

To know it is bad bad bad but it's all the food he will want 

until tomorrow. 

To stare straight ahead, to know something is coming soon 

to kill him. 

The box

you who weigh heavy in this box, a mound, bits

of rock, consecrated chards: today i am done with you. 

i am done writing about you. 

i am done talking about you. 

my jaws ache from talking about you. 

i am done looking at you. 

my hands cramp from looking at your photos, 

from packing up your things. 

i am done thinking about you. 

thinking about you raises 

my blood pressure. thinking about you 

slows my breath, 

thinking about you 

winds me up into a knot. 

And writing no longer releases. 

it's always about loss, always this disintegration, 

always this end, never

about touching, never about hope, never resurrection:

because footprints melt with the snow--

that’s what I know.

How many different ways can i tell you 

how sorry i feel? but this life without you 

will be lived. 

i will not jump off the golden gate. 

i will not overdose 

on ativan. 

you will be the train that roars out 

of this station into the end of this world 

and i will join you but not today; 

today your whistle will blow more faint, 

its scream will fade far from this room. 

this is relief. this is what i need. 

because i am exhausted. 

because my tear ducts have dried up. 

because i need to sleep a whole night. 

because i need to eat. 

because I cannot go on like this,

filled to the brim with fright and rue, 

with dread, because it only gets worse

if I let it.

.

I wish

Suddenly his eyes open with glee

therein--amused as if interrupted 

from a story an old friend is telling--

which makes his face young and handsome again,

the sight of which takes my breath. 

I lean over the rail of the hospital bed, my face above his, 

a strange joy surging in me
to see him again so unencumbered. 

I take his hand in mine, shyly, because I have not
taken his hand enough, 

I realize that now, I have been too stingy with this aspect 

and a spark of self hate flares but I ignore it and hold 

his boyish gaze in mine, gulping it down because he has been sick 

so long and so much has been tried to heal him but now 

there is nothing left to try yet he seems not to know 

that time is closing in, he seems amused, 

he seems pleased to see me, pleased to hold my hand. 

I love you, I say, and his pupils shine clear as bubbles 

and glisten with amusement when he says, I love you too, 

and for a long time our eyes can not move and then his close again.

I do not know this is the last time but I do know he closes them 

without fear or regret, without worry and woe, without memory, 

anger, pain. That's how it seems to me. 

I could say I wish I knew for sure but what I know 

is enough.