ISSUE: Winter 2009
Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?
What but loss comes round with the changing season?
He is dead whom, daring, I called a brother
with that leftover life perched on his shoulder
cawing departure.
He made one last roll of the dice. He met his
last, best interlocutor days before he
lay down for the surgery that might/might not
extend the gamble.
What they said belongs to them. Now a son writes
elegies, though he has a living father.
One loves sage tea, one gave the world the scent of
his mother’s coffee.
Light has shrunk back to what it was in April,
incrementally will shrink back to winter.
I can’t call my peregrinations “exile,”
but count the mornings.
In a basket hung from the wall, its handle
festooned with cloth flowers from chocolate boxes,
mottled purple shallots, and looped beside it,
a braid of garlic.
I remember, ten days after a birthday
(counterpoint and candlelight in the wineglass),
how the woman radiologist’s fingers
probed, not caressing.
So, reprise (what wasn’t called a “recurrence”)
of a fifteen-years-ago rite of passage:
I arrived, encumbered with excess baggage,
scarred, on the threshold.
Through the mild winter sun in February,
two or three times weekly to Gobelins, the
geriatric hospital where my friend was
getting her nerve back.
At the end of elegant proofs and lyric,
incoherent furious trolls in diapers.
Fragile and ephemeral as all beauty:
the human spirit—
while the former journalist watched, took notes and,
shocked, regaled her visitors with dispatches
from the war zone in which she was embedded,
biding her time there.
Now in our own leftover lives, we toast our
memories and continence. I have scars where
breasts were, her gnarled fingers, these days, can hardly
hold the pen steady.
Thousands mourn him, while in the hush and hum of
life support for multiple organ failure,
utter solitude, poise of scarlet wings that
flutter, and vanish.
