Poetry

Twelve ounces coffee 
with skim milk, not whole, then walk
forty minutes flat

Our radio wouldn’t dare blast through my father’s orations;
he’d tote his small son on drug rep calls, navigate back roads, the ultimate detail man.

I watch my mom for signs she’s going to be leaving me soon, even as she’s still here. She looks more fragile. A little more lost. Is she?

Together, we’ll visit our friend
who no longer knows us, and pluck
those pesky little whiskers
off her chin.

There’s nothing as beautiful as a marina at dawn
the clacking of ducks
the sky clearing away
the remnants of a storm

Transition states not stasis not static
No longer substrate, not yet product
Highest energy on reaction coordinates
Breaking and making covalent bonds

For a DaTscan
to confirm 
I have Parkinson’s,
I am injected
with a radioactive tracer.

You came alive at dawn, craving speed,
eager to clock time and distance.

I will bundle you in blankets and place you 
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

“Dad, do you know what day it is?”
“Yes, it’s my birthday.”

Sometimes forgetting is willful, even hoped for.
How he carried himself as he walked across the yard,
Between one building and the next.

I pivoted on the balls of my feet,
to not fall off to the left or the right
but to sit me down on the flat part
of the roof.

The man whose wife is having a baby
crouches in his chair like a fetus,
can feel himself kicking.

Like Aspen leaves adrift on yellowed-cold,
we flutter, down from youth – to frailty.

I plan on getting you around the house
as you hobble from room to room
with your right leg bandaged up
and swollen from a recent surgery.

cancer in her bones
cancer in her cage
frantic butterflies
trapped in a rage

The emergency department, a bustling fray,
Trucks backed up in the ambulance bay.
A mother and child, full of fear,
Scared of needles, lots of tears.
So much the child couldn’t understand,
I took a moment. I held her hand.

Arctic icebergs are breaking up,
Melting Antarctica airport-runways need new sub,
Strong gales have torn apart buildings, Oops:
Flooding also moved houses like floating cups.

The evening began with a question to myself.

“Will I have to give out medical advice at this wedding, too?”

All the world is on the wind:
Plants coming into bloom,
Distant fires burning forests and homes,
Smokestacks exhaling on the third shift,

An Epic poem
My E.M.R. symphony
A Haiku haiku

I could die on a day just like this
With a slant of sun casting dramatic shadows on my face
The nattering birds are finally unconcerned now the snow
Is melting into mud and their feeder is full again

The limbic system behind the game
They say it’s all in the brain,
The amygdala that is not the same,
Smaller than all, experiencing more pain!

It will, like a limb crashing-down
behind you on a wooded path,
cause you to turn, startled,

Argument on hold, we sit. 
The waiting-room phone rings;

we don’t know the name. 
We’re beginning to feel like drones

He’s forgotten, I hear
them whisper, what
he’s learned or loved.

She has toiled, she has wept, 
Mornings of cold and fatigue,
She has bit odds and awoken,
Yet today, she smiles,

There is nothing to say—
this moment, now, with you,
is so fragile, so transient that
it can only be known but
never expressed or spoken . . .

She is an artist
Painting pictures

Shiny wire rims encircle wrinkled eyelids,
pinkish chiffon veils gliding across Sycamore orbs;
cornflower blue sclera injected with burgundy webs,
underlined by ashen puffs of fatigue.

The contents are “time-sensitive.”
I slit the envelope with my finger.

Gray skies spread above us like lace
on a communion tray.
Inside, they fed my father

He carved a spot of skin today, and then another,
The slice all stained to find the danger,
In search of foes, to map the border.
Just a bit more, he dug in deeper.

What moves, shore or ship,
when souls sail, blinking,
heartbeat . . . a blip,
yonder fog engaged,

muted by seas

I find myself starting to repeat
the names, like Mom did,
from the top, so she could get
to the one she wanted.

Cough cold, fever, and chills
Here’s the season of growing medical bills

LOVE is not for everyone.
Avoid LOVE if you are not prepared, as this may cause a sudden, unsafe drop in blood pressure.

No one will know, now, or care
that, in your rush this morning,
you grabbed one dark blue sock
and one black in the rumpled sock drawer.

A week ago, you thought the next breath could be your last.
The family and friends were buzzing with worry
and all visited you in such a scurry.
The nurses and doctors fixed you—quite fast! 

I sometimes just felt the reds and yellows randomly cutting through the greens, but without thinking, without appreciation, without judgment. 

Roses from Susan and a christening
into what I have no idea of.

On Terminal Disease Square, at the intersection of Doubt and Despair, live the Benders of time,

The art of sighing isn’t hard to master;
each day greets us with news of fresh disaster.

You could fly for an instant
whole body in separate hands
cupped and held hands
you could fly when they let you

Nanuk thought it was time,
time to go out on the ice,
to relieve her family of one more useless
mouth to feed during this hungry time

We’re all Gatsby, always have been, standing lonely on our own pier, 
Looking for the certain future, rich as Croesus, really, in this world, 
Food, rent, man, and printed books online. It’s all on line!

Under the dresser
a small plastic button
uncovered as if
all of the sudden,

I could have used the set of traveling colors,
the brush with its barrel of water.

They still call it that
Even though now it’s all just screen time
Of course it is day
Definitely.

In the beginning there is chaos.
Alarms and running and pressured orders.
A conglomerate of people with a shared goal.

I laugh when others laugh,
but offer naught to conversation;
standing still against a shaded wall
observing without participation.

Snowflakes wide

as white hens. Amaranth

bleeds scarlet on the snow.

Midnight. Sleep eludes me.
As hours pass, my brain is full
of the usual black dogs

I’m twenty-one, touring a Chicago hospital in a dirty-snow winter, trailing a student who raves about the school, its illustrious doctors.

I remember her clumping tread
the rubber-tipped cane
striking the floor before
the halt-slide step

In a slot of Grandma Ada’s rolltop
I found a hand-colored photo
of Uncle D. in his Marine uniform, smiling,
eyes bluer than the overbright sky
of the hand-tinted tropical backdrop

Her mom’s been bleeding for days.
Transfusion after transfusion
As if her veins were sieves

You will care for them when it’s time
With static eyes, pores firing off sweat,

The guy in charge of the cemetery
said I would like this site.
It has a seasonal view, Mead’s Mountain in winter,
and you can hear the stream year-round.

I saw geraniums
in the first snow,
blood-bright,
upright,
and one yellow daisy.

sacrificing self.
physicians spend a lifetime,
to save another.

People flicker out. Each of us has an unknown
expiration date.

It was a fine Sunday morning
when I felt the first sign.

Sunburnt stranger
Buries face in hands
Staggers shadeless sidewalk

Hands clasped,
fingers interlaced
for just a moment

We named you posthumously
since you died the same day
as the prince

Pain lives in both misery and joy, respectively
it is the volume and projection that differs among them.

Meet me after midnight
at the place all lovers go
at the edge of names and words 
and of everything we know

Those shoes have traveled far
And borne their wearer well
To tend to newborn cries
And lift where others fell

She ties a string around my shoe
to remind me what day it is, 
I try to hold on, 
knowing right from left – memories.

I didn’t think she’d be here
for the birth of her first grandchild,
but you never know what a ghost will do

Mid afternoon, bright winter’s day
A string of headlights coming my way
The deliberate solemn caravan gives pause for reflection 

A hungry stomach
When I finish morning rounds
I’ll take one box please

At 3:00 a.m. a storm whips the trees.
I roll over, breast aching.

when you got with me I had no idea 
it could be a life-sentence you’re an 
armed robber holding me under false
imprisonment in my own body

They turned off the lights
in the hallway and area where I was seated.
The maintenance man was working
on some problem he
was having with the lights,
so there I was,
in the dark,
once again,
like I had been my whole life.

The barricade was built on my car 
dashboard during my daily drive, 
petit Gavroche shot
in the forty-fourth CD.

So now she cuts out paper stars,
stenciled onto construction paper.

Light refracted to reveal our thoughts and fears
Perhaps too much so.
We are naked to one another’s stares
As if we can no longer conceal the vulnerabilities within.

Always up for schwitz
In sauna, hot tub or springs
To rid self of bad
Humors/tumors, dread virus
–I would rather not be dead.

Whatever else may happen
to a man on his back for six months,
at least he must become expert on himself.

Cancer had chewed away half her mouth and face,
carving the soft palette, chiseling the jawbone,
cutting her cheek out, slicing the tongue lengthwise.

His age and comorbidities were now rehearsed and repeated without effort daily,
His short years of existence now condensed to a list of clinical diagnoses

I am the rose in the desert,
withered for lack of rain.

Not even a fourth of possible- that’s all
your arm and you will get without it-
Forty degrees of forward.

She told me that she sat with him
At the dining table.
They had bought some pills,
Had made a pact long ago.

My mind is noise today.

The summer was hot enough
that earthworms in my neighborhood
unfortunate enough to crawl
out of the grass onto the sidewalk
fried into curled bits of brown string.

When the night is young, the moon will never fall
or sunrise into day
and for a moment, my thoughts are whole
yet rarely do they stay

I want to know one of your secrets
what you dream about at night
who it is you would die for
what you still want from this life

Please hold my hands, she said.
Is this it? Is this where I am going to die?
I am so exhausted.

My roots sink deeper than I know.

I think about you often,
My former teacher.
You died while I was
In graduate school.

I thought of thresholds—
intimations of mortality
in the undiscovered country
of lost dreams.

On my midnight pallet lying,
full of dread and stars in my belly,
I count out all the bones
I had broken in my time:

The angled morning sun
reveals the grimy streaks
on the windows
as I wait for breakfast.

There you are beyond my reach,
Separated by space and barred
From my physical greeting.

Since midnight,
no place to sleep
just a coffee machine
with no sugar or cream.

How much of me is you,
And you, me?
When I remember the first of us,
It’s just a blur of becoming.

Unlike ripples fading away,
old dreams can’t be kept at bay.