Keeper

Keeper

Bright sun of my bright day,

I thank God for being alive--

a way of writing I once thought heartless.

                                                               

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Logan Airport, Boston

Even though it begs comparison, who among us will ask,

because the lens for all its power blurs the periphery

into a snow squall, into a milk-blue cataract.  Coming back

from my mother’s sick bed again the long wide corridor of chess-

board squares, its staunch pawns, a bishop sliding

quiet and extreme into a crowded room (who hasn’t crept

up to the crack in the door in their mind and stood eves-

dropping on the dying and, hyper whiskers tensile, the dark

skits at the first proverbial twig?)  Walking away got easier

every time but slower too, you know?  Molasses slow and just

as heavy, just as dark and as soundless--we’re all a bunch

of zombies I thought but it took me twenty squares to say it--

like the blast trauma dead who die without a mark on them,

or the boy in the lake, one of the twelve drowned that summer,

who died of acute dilation of the heart--I think: the flawless

faces, what peace and quiet their faces make (when I was a kid and she’d

scream I just want some peace and quiet I thought she meant

piece and I wanted to find it for her desperately sifting through

the broken window glass and dolls heads, their matted skulls,

the holes where a single lock of hair and glue pulled through

and looking into it was patches  made elusive, made escape, made

a grotesque want to hide it with her stained underpants and rest

of that glass (don’t ask) and I wonder how would, if she died after the beating,

the mortician cover the stitched lip, the swollen closed eye, 

the neck bruising?  What kind of foundation or blush?  Is

their palate any different than a teenagers)  What mascara?

I’m coming on the corner and forget where I need

to turn right or left or straight through and a woman

crouches down by the door and her palms and face are great

friends and she’s heaving and hauling and I’m heaving

and hauling so I sit next to her on the black square and hold

her.  I don’t know who she is.  I remember a story about a light-

house keeper who went out into the blizzard with his fire

and the wind kept snuffing it out until finally he put it

in his mouth and bent to it all and pushed, finally, out the door.

He counted each stair, burning more and more.  There were 43.

Round and round the tower to light the light. Arriving

and breathing on the wick isn’t he, I have to ask, in as much

pain as the captain being battered on the rocks, or about to be

before the light shines out, before he can (he still

has time) change course?  Seeing that keeper climb those stairs

is seeing myself walking down that hall to my broken

and bloody mother.  Walking back is that fire in my mouth.

Yes, she is hurting.  She is going to die of it eventually. 

But she is sedated.  She’s played her last piece.  I’m holding

this woman who I don’t know.  And this is our only anesthesia.

And the comparison, in case you missed it, is whose pain

is worse?  The injured?  Or the one lifting their lips to the medicine?