Category: Poetry

—A Golden Shovel after Katie Englehart’s “We Are Going to Keep You Safe Even if It Kills Your Spirit,” The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2021

 

No matter what the therapists say about dementia, how we
should know our half-blind mother can’t live alone, how they are
clear she can’t afford to fall—the only way to keep her going
on her own (not risk-free) is a scooter or a four-wheel walker, or to
move her to a place, they won’t say where—best to keep
the care type vague—helpful doctors will tell you
recommended choices: memory pills, life locked inside, a safe
space, always a mask, no rugs or dancing, hugs, even
if your loved one, if Mom, is vaccinated, if
we instead allow her finger-walking walls, her wandering, it
wouldn’t be the worst to drop and die at home, we’ll say—what kills
is a voice silenced or a vision atrophied, when all your
good intention stymies dignity, what we recall of spirit.

 

“All things are poisons, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
–Paracelsus

During rituals of divination,
Mayan sorcerers and healers
induced risky hallucinations
with Brugmansia candida,
angel’s trumpet. The poison
in its white, waxy flowers
and dark green leaves,
ingested or absorbed through
the body’s mucous membranes,
causes convulsions, paralysis,
coma, and death.

 

To dilate the pupils of their eyes
and bring a flush to their cheeks,
fashionable ladies in medieval Europe
drank juice pressed from the berries
and leaves of Atropa belladonna,
the deadly nightshade.
To enhance their beauty,
they risked their lives with a poison
used since antiquity to alter potions
and tip arrows with lethal results.

 

Our ancestors felt more closely
than we the embrace
of science and mystery.
We are still looking
for the boundary.
Chemicals crossing
the blood-brain barrier
create effects in the brain
that achieve results in the body,
altering perceptions
of pleasure and pain.
Reliever of illness
or harbinger of death
is a matter of degree.

 

Digitalis from foxglove,
lily of the valley, and oleander
strengthens the heart’s contractions
while causing blurred and double vision
and hallucinations.
Taxol from the bark of the Pacific yew
destroys cancers of the breast
and ovaries but harms the liver.
Although it induces nausea,
vincristine, an alkaloid
from Madagascar periwinkle,
is the reason why most children
with leukemia now survive.

 

For the stomach spasms
I suffered as a child,
I was prescribed a daily dose
of a chalky green medicine
containing belladonna alkaloids
and phenobarbital
to prevent nausea and relax me.

 

Derived from salicin
in willow bark and meadowsweet,
aspirin reduces inflammation,
eases headache, and lowers fever.
Years ago, my great-aunt, sick of life,
swallowed the entire contents
of a bottle and bled to death.

Grief is a sudden room.
After flailing around, breaking
all the furniture inside it for years,
you can think you’ve shut
the ancient door behind you,
but the latch hasn’t worked for aeons,
it will just pop open anytime
you open a window, elsewhere
in your mind. No matter. The room
will arrange itself in your absence
and wait for your return.
You’ve never seen such patience.

A Robin at the Bus Station

Newly loose with death,
I can imagine her stomach, the give.
I bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
prop her head. A pine branch blanket.
You taught me how to care for the dead like this,
how to get quiet in their moment,
early January, no other willing witness.
It’s big work. And even I step away,
whisked back to life by the bus,
where in front of me a young man
video chats his girlfriend, who cries
the entire hour-long ride as he slumps
further into his seat, humming short responses.
A whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
and despite her foreign tongue
I can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
I press a warm thumb into the sea
spinning past the window. Bleached shell,
pine branch, stuttering connection.
With these tired hands, we can only
build beds, soft spaces to land.

 

Fall in Languedoc

Officials in Japan are running out
of storage space for the ocean water
used to cool down Fukushima’s
nuclear cores. Tens of thousands
of tons, all newly radioactive,
with talks of releasing it all back
into the ocean. Across the globe,

 

we fill a tractor load—two or three
tons of grapes—in four hours
with a team of eight. What would
a hundred tons of our juice look like;
a thousand? I try to measure the ruined
water in tractorfuls, but run out of room
in my mental valley. How diluted
does a radioactive ocean have to be
before it stops killing everything
it laps up? How much longer
will the waters stand us?

 

Here, the Hérault’s been low
all summer, thirsty, only two storms
filling her throat. The gorges dried,
scratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
into my kayak’s belly, though
the carp are fat, the seaweed
an impenetrable forest. Here, slung

 

between the map’s bright red pins
that mark each nuclear throne,
I imagine the steel drums planted
beneath us, beating out a cold,
toxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
Tourist-trained, they visit us
at picnic hour, panting, patient,
catching grapes in their skinny mouths
swarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
from their fur as they polish
avocado peels of their fatty linings.

 

From a too-hot summer, the vines
have fried, harvest light this year.
The last fat bulbs were stripped
in the night by wild boars, though
Christian is diligent in his midnight
rounds, has caught half a dozen
perpetrators already. At lunch time,
he brings me their pink meat
in a small Tupperware, cut
neatly into strips.

CPH said, “too many” can be as few as three—

the magic number exposing how the trick is done,

light shifting from the blonde assistant to hands

concealed in the dark. the advertiser’s golden ratio

of aggregate melanin. the progressive tipping point

where the cool is lost from chic restaurants, the polish

from AP classroom. where they no longer feel

embarrassed for confusing Eunice for Jackie

for Miki. Julio for Erik for Hugo. where “diverse”

slippery slopes to “awkward,” “ghetto,” “overrun,” or

silent blue-eyed glances. the not flaxen straw

breaking the tolerant’s back. it’s a quaint thought.

but experience shows “too many” can be as few as

one.

 

When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history

I begin to form the word of my uterus and its

 

drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room

filled with women giddy from their return to somatic

 

solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its

futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward

 

just for time, passing from before to after

it. I begin to form the word, but the word—its roundness, its flat vacuum

 

of a face—swallows its own tail. After the medical abortion

I imagined a fish, small fry flapping, and still in some Boston Harbor

 

it haunts a stand of seagrass, is haunted in turn by its half-sibling

the surgically aborted, ripped from stories

 

too. Sibling’s sibling I do not speak of, my double-standard shame, my

ill-gotten fishlet, in my mind I hold you in loving kindness and say no

 

The curtain comes crashing down

and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,

doing it all for the bloated shadow

of a little man. How foolish I have been

again and again, poppy-cocked

and clumsy, letting the boom of a voice, the cast

of a giant, tease me into storming

the castle to take what I never lacked. What is

more incarnadine: the glitter of these

shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.

I look at the man and he looks back,

the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.

I am not the heroine, and I know that

too late. He has no power to give me, after all,

the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,

I understand he’d keep it. We all fell for green,

called it real. There’s no place like money.

There’s no seduction like a beast of sewn-up skins,

a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice

that tells us what we want to hear. Which of us

escapes? He told the lie; I did the killing.

A flamingo of a man in a pink-blush tux

plunked a single piano key repeatedly

 

for nearly an hour.

By the end of the evening

 

I heard such gorgeous silence

and sobbed. My mind

 

was in brambles and the notes he pecked

all hatched like eggs at once.

 

Every flap, every cheep

became your name and I became

 

a mockingbird. I said your name

as if I were your brother and just caught

 

you snooping in my desk

for the cigarettes I kept hidden.

 

Then I said your name

with the reverence of a child

 

learning his mother existed

as before-mother for the first time,

 

reconciling one identity with another.

Now I say it like we just met,

 

introduced by a mutual friend

we later admit we never liked.

 

I’m trying to commit

the syllables to memory

 

without making it obvious. Hi,

it’s nice to meet you. It’s nice

 

to see you again. Hi. It’s so nice. Your name.

I say it so often it loses meaning

 

the way cotton candy dissolves

so humbly and quickly

 

into a glass of water but the water

is delightfully altered, and I don’t remember

 

your face anymore

but you’re in the swirl,

 

and I drink and drink and

stay, please, with me, I am chapped,

 

chirping, I’m spun, oh sugar, oh

sweet, your

 

name, oh your name, your

sweet, invisible name.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku, I

won’t ask him about supernovas and black holes, about

New York or California, but

about his pond of fishes;

How they live two-dimensional lives

unaware that there is life beyond

water.  We can’t breathe without air,

Dr. Michio Kaku. We

 

can’t breathe even without the love

of our loved ones; the stomach churns, the heart

beats so fast when I think of my mother; in this

limited three-dimensional existence of

social media, and nuclear bomb,

Elon Musk Brand colonies in Mars, it is

hard for me to breathe if

I think about the moment

when the doctor woke me up: we have

been looking for you; your

mother is no more.

 

Did he really say your mother

or patient number something-something? Did he say,

your wife, to my father who was lying in the bed

against the wall? She lived a glorious life, she lived

an abundant life, I said, hugging him with one hand,

but not asking him to stop crying. I didn’t say

it is okay because it wasn’t; I didn’t say

it will be okay because it never will be.

 

That was five years ago; life was different then;

winter, less harsh. Deaths, not so common as today. How

worried I would have been about her

now, if she were still living, in the world

of rationed care? This year,

when caregivers need care, while

an invisible killer sucks away our souls.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku, I will ask

about dimensions. He said once,

that we are like those fishes who live

in two dimensions, we are like those fishes

who can’t imagine there is life

beyond water. I will ask if death is another dimension

where good people go. Of course, the

people we love are always good.

 

Do people who leave us, watch us

from this dimension? Like we watch

protest marches, hot delivery post-men,

from our balconies? Or is it a new life

where you are born at the same age

you had died, and you appear

in this world as you were?

 

Dear Michio Kaku, if

death is another dimension, is it in this world

of rivers, deserts, mountains, meadows?

I had once watched a short film where

people go after they are dead; it is like a commune,

similar to our world: a TV, a living room, people

who spew scathing comments or shower compassion,

but this world is crowded; the character we follow

is upset, confused, remembers her past life, and doesn’t

know how she reached here. She doesn’t know

what she remembers is a past life. What if

life after life is a crowded room

with a TV blaring. Mundane, poor,

full of absences.

 

If I meet Michio Kaku,

I will ask him these things. I will

ask him where dead people go. If

the dead are really dead. If

the world they go to is

really a happy world where

they rest; if they live next to us,

can see us, can help us, can bless us. If

they are in peace.

My favorite barn burned down today.
I loved it for its imperfections,
its usedness, the way it sagged
against itself. Postcard red
worn to gray. Today
as I drove by, flame
bit the spring sky.
A plume of smoke
visible for a mile.
A line of flashing lights,
traffic narrowed to a single lane,
hoses containing the heat
but stopping nothing.
Tomorrow’s commute
will offer a touch less
wonder. There’s a hole
in my future shaped
like an old barn.
I do not mean
to make more of this
than what it is:
a story about the body.