Thoughts on Dying

Knot
U.S.S. Constitution 

Thoughts on Dying

Out of the stillness of the unbound forest,
animals came forth from dens and nests.
And it was not fear or cunning
that made them so quiet,

but the desire to listen.
                                                From their Listening, a Temple
                                                Rainer Maria Rilke

The room you walk into after it’s all been taken
away: the masks, the machines, those beeping
hideous machines whose chords one day
in a lengthy visit reminded you of a vacuum
cleaner chord you’d once caught under the corner
of the rug and how if you were to dangle it
from your hand and tug sharp it would all lift up
as if from some brief breeze and it would be righted
again.  Forget going all the way to the wall
where the prongs, bent from all the other
frustrated, furious, lazy tugs the others have
tightened it to.  Forget reaching to the wall
with your own hand extended, the electric
buzz a hum in your dry palm.  That is not for us
to do.  The tubes they need to pull through

his lungs, his throat, they slide up quietly, the way
he’d shift his weight in the night to try to keep you
sleeping…everyting is cooler now and every machine
he needed is gone to storage, the plastic bits
ready I imagine though I don’t know, for incineration,
and I think: the inside of him is on them, drying
in the open air.  The tray waits, the way a vacuum
would wait, in a windowless room.  Don’t even
think about it.  It’s enough knowing the sun is
going to be bright today and after they’ve made him
comfortable and you come back in maybe it will be
on his face and if you’d like to think it’s God, please,
think it’s God.  And if you’d like to stare at
that empty socket on the wall, how it looks too much
like a set of eyes and round O mouth, please,
think it’s a scream.  Because it breathed too, didn’t it?

When you put your hand near to it, wasn’t it,
brief, right, but wasn’t it, warm as a cheek in the sun?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Earth

Image
Of Earth Old mistakes come calling: no life happens just once.  Whatever snags even the edge of your days will abide. You are a turtle with all the years on your back. Your head sinks down into the mud. You must bear it.  You need a thick shell in all that rain.                                                                                                 William Stafford                   ...
Read more

With The Living

Image
Among them New Bedford Whaling Museum With The Living What is fidelity?  To what does it hold?  The point of departure, or the turning road that is departure and absence and the halfway home?  What we are and what we were once are far estranged.                                                 Wendell Berry                                                 The Dance I: a small whale The juvenile female humpback came through to the cove almost unnoticed and maybe it had been ...
Read more

Shag

Image
Shag and these regions now have little to say for themselves except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upwards freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.                                                            Elizabeth Bishop                                                            "Cape Breton" The way my father would shape the word in his throat and bring it up gargling you could tell hew didn't like the bird: shag .  And his whole lower jaw would sag and he'd say they all oughta be shot.  They were noting at all to look at, especially dripping on rusted front rail...
Read more