Rescue

Rescue

What then?  To pull you through after all these

years on such a narrow bed that can catch your death

so effortlessly, as though the whole time

its locked wheels are the one

object in the room that waits outside strength

or doesn’t even need it?  Earlier, because there was nothing else

to say or nothing else heard (what with the tubes

through your nose, the anchor against

your cheek to secure your breathing)

I’d imagined your coffin with such ease I spooked

myself.  Yes, it’s come to this.  And so

to beat back the blows the way

day after day you taught me to

and day after day I failed to learn I finally

stood up inside myself and said: I’ll take that

now, I’ll take that stick that belt--or, when it all

came down to muscle, your tongue

pressed to the floor of your chapped and chaffed-

scraped pitiful jaw.  I saw now

the bed and the head in the bed and the fading

buoyancy of your face.  Grey as your driftwood

cane.  Grey as your make-up removal clay.  And

because standing up on the inside means I lean,

almost lying inside you again, into your face, I saw

the way you flicked your eyelids at the close of it all,

and the way (maybe it was relief) you cried

as you died while I threw your tools, your guns

and glass, your thumbed code of crass,

into the furnace of each of our old selves.  I saw you sigh.

I saw you sigh the way that old cow maybe sighed

after my father’s accident maimed him beyond

repair and she, hungry, standing for days and days

unmaintained, at first the balloon of her udder

a curiosity and then, as though she had dropsy,

she cracked and oozed and leaked, she bellowed

alone.  When all she needed was a salve and hands

  

and a soft song the man with the rifle

came instead and the stall was empty after that.

I wonder now, looking at you, after I’d whispered

what I’d whispered into your ear and you cried

if she looked into him the way you looked into me:

a relief just after the flash.  And maybe he prayed for,

if not her end to her suffering, the four kids in the house,

all under ten, playing with their Christmas toys

while the chimney smoked too close to the roof

and the snow fell hard and the people came in and out

like someone, a human this time, had died

and was gone, finally, for good.