sickbed





sickbed

our bed 

shrinks from the soot

and hapless odors

holds us close

                            Elizabeth Bishop

                            Varick Street


this absence is anticipated 

the way waiting out her dying 

seems the least discrete: pee

breaks, creaking number three

stairs and in between frictions

of released (even after being

so sneaky) cedar floor suites

(the one that seems

to be breathed like a swisher

sweet) on our way to relieve

ourselves which really means

making room for more ease

sudden gone the toilet takes on

because why not we're going so

don't waste a trip the whisper

quirt of disinfectant the one healthy

breath the one noise that will

come back afterwards the gesture

of holding the nose over 

the mostly wiped away sick

how some smells immobolize

and then go on into the future

the way sounds do when you're through

i want to go with you but first i want to

press my full weight on every board

and stair rub i want to flush the toilet

every time and not to have to 

wait not to have to tiptoe back

to your bed where you're sleeping

the last of your morphine off 

the twitch in your cheeks come to

mean like some eyelid on a coma-

tose invalid that some noise has

got through it's like a breakthrough

like wading to the water spewed

with ivy spewed with alder spewed

with a whole clean-up crew i want

to get to you then by instinct 

like bats do switching frequency easy

\drawing the sheets back after

they arrive and take you and make you

clean again while I sit and try 

to doze and soak (or want to but don't)

in the room that almost instantly

starts reclaiming for itself some of

what it was before any of us came

rearranged made a life then vacated

like weight either lost gradually or 

stropped down eventually 

to the flip of the switch



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Birthday

Image
Rich Entel Cardboard Menagerie  Birthday It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done.  And finally you can’t lift it anymore. …You never intended that it should come to this. William Stafford "It’s heavy to drag, this big sack..." Somewhere out in the world there’s a thirty three year old who took you up after you left, who was shocked like your cheek from the combustion of gunpowder breaching your skull and even your jaw, (the heavy pistol slid and you were awake the whole way only to slip first coma then no.)  And maybe it wasn’t like you’d planned it, maybe what you’d intended had nothing to do with her and maybe it was instead all the carefully folded clothes you carried from room to room when your sister ran the streets and your mother walked and walked and called down those Lynn alley drain pi...
Read more

Mill Girls

Image
Mill No. 4 Greenville, NH Mill Girls: A Sense of Direction When they shook the box, and poured out its chances, you were appointed to be happy.  Even in a prison they would give you the good cell…                                                                                 William Stafford                                                ...
Read more

Thanksgiving

Image
Thanksgiving Too late you learned to care that clean places make people want to need you, want to need to be sitting easy within little distraction: ants in the kitchen on the stove where the pilot light is plugged and hissing some as the jets sputter and tick and the knob stays at a perpetual leeward lean.   The last thing it lit was her cigarette and the gas wafted and could’ve killed everyone in the house but you opened the windows to get clean air in.   I want to come home and make it right for you, to fight your quiet despair with as simple a bottle as Windex and a box of your favorite wine, maybe a six pack of Narragansett.   These days   you spend too much time rubbing your permanently damaged hand, the spot where the lost last finger once, when it was first taken off completely, unthreaded itself like a sighing corset that's always been  too tight, lungs, stomach,  squished into the hourglass ...
Read more