mikecoghI
The dying man
lies in state
moaning in intervals
to the Christmas carols
creating white noise.
The house is broken
as the fallow man
with boarded up rooms
once holding eight children
and a wife
now in a nursing home
20 miles away lost in her
childhood.
His fever worsens. Body parts fighting body parts.
They do not know what it means not to function.
He does not remember a life without this house.
II
Death is inconvenient
to the living.
My children walk past the bed
running up and down the stairs
with presents and grandma’s
smile in their heads.
They do not know their great grandfather
lying down.
They have never seen him unshaven or
with eyes closed.
The grunts do not register how
far life comes.
I think of Shakespeare’s Ages of Man.
I think in loss and family
and how much we leave
when our bodies pass.
I do not shush their laughter
or their screams opening up
presents that filled their heads
during the four hours drive.
simononlyIII
He will not walk again
as I did into the cold wind
of the winter Pennsylvania town,
which just two months before
flooded its banks laying waste
to everything between the mountains.
Houses are broken with splintered wood
piled up on the frozen ground.
It is not hard to believe
that things will never grow again,
that spring will abandon this place
of empty dark rooms staring
out on wet streets.
The town is silent with empty spaces
and I walk down the middle of the street
unwilling to get too close to quiet things
that no longer function
in their intended purpose.
The river moves slowly, innocuous, heading south
on this Christmas, with broken gray and brown
limbs littering the muddy banks.
The sun stays hidden where the people are.
I walk back to the house.
More visitors for the dying man.
We do not whisper our greetings
for it seems disrespectful
since dying is not dead
as the lying man’s room
grows dark first.
No one goes to light a lamp.
flickr4jazzIV
He has not opened his eyes in three days.
One son makes the morphine liquid
as they schedule the wake
for the evening. No one asks
me to watch him – a step
daughter’s husband will sleep
sound in a creaking house with
pipes knocking.
The sinks have yellow rings
and the refrigerator is filled
with soy and yogurt and dice red
potatoes with green pepper and curry.
The city relatives have come and gone
leaving vinaigrette dressing.
The dying man liked French on his salad.
He liked to steal the small fruit filled
chocolates the kids abandoned in
broken halves when only I was looking.
He would pop them in his mouth
and hide them in his cheeks
to let them dissolve –
savoring the juices as they dripped
down his throat while telling me
about the mountain filling the window.
V
The loggers bought the rights
and cut down the whole right side
and would have done more if the
demand stayed.
He still saw the bald mountain from forty years ago.
I thought how beautiful it must be to see a sun set
falling behind a bald mountain.
Nicholas_TThe mountain was his –
hovering over
always overbearing
especially those years
after his two sons died
playing hide and go seek
in a dryer that couldn’t open.
It is said he carried them from
their repose – twins –
dead into his house.
The mountain had no answers then just
like today. A quiet, dumb mound staring
at us – moving so fast and loudly
only to fall in his resemblance.
He will die in a few days,
long after any tears
were meant for him,
after his daughter drove
his wife down and she
held his hand staring
at the window wondering
whose house this was and
how anyone could live with
such a draft and a layer of dust
on everything.
VI
The kids play with their cousins
behind the swollen door
with toy men who never die.
We wait for the grunts to end
and the Christmas songs.
I wait for a secret being this
close to death.
You need more faith to die without God.
The sons and daughters carry on in silence
knowing their father’s strength.
They leave off in the middle of a conversation
as if to take a private call.
jofo2005The cold of the mountain
makes the bed numb.
I can not feel here where
everything is part of the landscape –
barren, decaying, quiet.
This land and people hold
the same secret as the river that
reveals nothing in brown swirls.
VII
We pack our bags
and shake hands.
We are just witnesses
to the last stage of this man.
He is already foreign and gone.
We do not fade or disappear.
We shrink until we are unrecognizable.
I watch the old man breathe his
last breaths I will see
and think how dignity and pride
are the same and belong
to the living.
I walk into life. My children
laughing with cookie crumbs falling
out of their mouths.
My wife sobs low in her seat.
I drive to make the mountains disappear
to make the river just another
blue line on the map,
and to forget
how different
death is from life.
I drive away grateful how silently
those Pennsylvania winter hills
protect their secrets.
]]>
