SHOW US THE PLEIADES

 
If the snow does not fall

outside the hospital window

then cherry blossom

If the body does not float

above the hospital bed

then saline drip

Your kingdom drops away

from you like your very own

face, sloped. A king

transformed into a mountain.
 
Show us your brain

a blackberry

Show us your tumor

a lagoon

Heaven is a cup of teeth,

it shines. What island have we

washed upon where a man

must live in the pit of his own body
 
sending notes

to the rest of us on earth?
 
Christ walks down the hall. If

the snow does not fall outside

the sanatorium window

then rain drop

Christ with his fists dragging

and your name locked inside

His mouth.

If the body does not float above

the sanatorium bed

then electric shock-

a body coming down the wild hall forever.

And if cotton then gauze-

a young surgeon holding your brain

in his hands and chanting

over it-

the cerebral cortex

the cerebellum glowing

forever and ever amen

If not that story then this:

Lift the pillars of heaven off our tired shoulders.

If death then skyscraper.

Show us the Pleiades

Show us the Pleiades

burning

outside the hospice window.

GRIEF

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla  
         
you must count yourself lucky.

You must offer her what's left

of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish

you must put aside

and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,

her eyes moving from the clock

to the television and back again.

I am not afraid. She has been here before

and now I can recognize her gait

as she approaches the house.

Some nights, when I know she's coming,

I unlock the door, lie down on my back,

and count her steps

from the street to the porch.

Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,

tells me to write down

everyone I have ever known

and we separate them between the living and the dead

so she can pick each name at random.

I play her favorite Willie Nelson album

because she misses Texas

but I don't ask why.

She hums a little,

the way my brother does when he gardens.

We sit for an hour

while she tells me how unreasonable I've been,

taking down the pictures of my family,

not writing, refusing to shower,

staring too hard at girls younger than my sister.

Eventually she puts one of her heavy

purple arms around me, leans

her head against mine,

and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.

So I tell her,

things are feeling romantic.

She pulls another name, this time

from the dead

and turns to me in that way that parents do

so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.

Romantic? She says,

reading the name out loud, slowly

so I am aware of each syllable,

each consonant resembling a swollen arm, the collapsed ear,

a mouth full of teeth, each vowel

wrapping around the bones like new muscle,

the sound of that person's body

and how reckless it is,

how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

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