The Spread – GN
She’s slim, wearing silk pajamas, weak, purposeful,
folding paper towels into precise fourths
and setting them on the side of the sink.
With the economy of the dying she weighs
the need for each word against its cost to her reserve.
She doesn’t want me to see this.
She doesn’t want her daughter to see this more.
She needs my help.
Peeling back the gauze she says
This is the spread
and for the first time I see cancer, the crab.
Some of it has crawled outside of her skin
and grows there – a mountainous landscape
the diameter of a dinner plate,
hard, red, yellow, raw, oozing, wrong.
Some of it is tenting up the skin nearby.
We work together until it is clean and covered.
I pray to see the beauty beyond the horror.
My prayer is answered until I drive away.
Sitting with the Not Dying – MO
No one knows why she’s still here.
Three months without food, two weeks without water,
she has become an anatomy lesson:
dark, fixed pupils in an adamantine face,
the cords tying the bonnet of her skull clearly outlined
on her neck,
veins running like mole tunnels over her forehead,
feet blackening.
She breathes.
I hold her hand,
read to her from her own bible,
the underlined and highlighted bits,
in the hope that she hears and finds comfort.
She might wish I’d shut up
so she can finish her business of dying.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Sitting with the Dead – MS
Margie S. died today, called at 6:15 a.m.
aged 62, surrounded by no one.
A ward of the state since her son went to jail,
she lies naked, covered by a grayish sheet,
no pictures, no teddy bears in sight.
I read her prayers I don’t believe
about I love I do believe.
And the staff in this place
about whom you would think the worst
if you saw them out on the street,
come to touch her body and say good bye.