Late life, fragment
“Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.”—Semezdin Mehmedinovic
“We are an echo that runs, skittering,
Through a train of rooms.”—Czeslsa Milosz
Shall I seduce you with loneliness and defeat, dark and damp, or the body’s regeneration?
So here it is:
a small pink ridge hills the middle of my chest, a scar which knuckles along the once taut skin of itinerant days long before there was a this day, an ill-equipped railroad track caravanning across the center of my life, perfectly bifurcated, the before and the after formed from an act of scapple and clamp invasive as the doctor’s voice, ‘if we do not operate, you will die,’ the riddle that gets all choked out in order to save a life, my own, as it were, the legs’ till which quiver at night when weary or bubbly of meds, the frosty talks with myself in bed late at night when the dark outside is a tone I cannot locate clearly as misgivings press against the disfigurement of my body, my head a medical steel spoon, or an incubus sitting atop me, ghoul-growling and perked pointedly and ripe, this daily reminder of life’s survival of the bruising and atrophy, the worry a dark cul-de-sac of compost in the back yard, a gutter in the back of the throat accumulating an aphid buzzing, the decay and noirish rebirth of all things, picked apart and unwinding now,
me.
Was it me
who once fed rootless will and darkness, the hunger beneath the disfigurement, the tools of elongated language that corrupt certainty as we stepped off the margins of our days, together once on the sand beneath wind-spat umbrellas counting the clicks and uprising from the Pacific, Kenting’s calling late in the day, once our voice as blue and stormy as a varicose sky when the squall brew up a package of fear and returned four years later when death returned from its cocoon under the convex lights above my supine floating in the operation room, your ghost hand still warm in mine, you a corridor away as I counted backwards from 100, rounding numbers towarding oblivion, thinking that I would one day whisper to you, again blessed love, if I awoke from that sterilized theatre unseasonably cold against my skin’ distance’s touch old as my eyes folded down into the blasé of my waking and the counting, a body’s failure later exposed by a sterilized bone-saw as the manubrium broke open up as the sternum of a flower’s stamen & sepal on a warm late-April morning, but this was in truth only mid-March, our heart vegetation or our flesh flora or possibly,
neither.
Shall I bribe you with loneliness and defeat, dark and damp, or the emancipation of my body’s regeneration?
As I lay
once beneath the lights, a rain dance between raindrops, remembering when we galloped against one another in the backseat of your father’s car, humidity as kiss, falling stars as buttons uncurled, our fingers separated and your breasts awoke beneath the tremor of my unbuckled hope, in the night when we learned more of ourselves than all those drive-by stars, the charting mythology and rocket launches when we trapezed the fear and broke our lives toward light, mountain, macadam, a deer leaping in the ditch and our syllables as awkward as our fingers trembling, was that all a narcotically induced dream, merely metaphor
or the body’s disfigured memory of this cloven life gnarled between the hemispheres of the heart
and the imperishable four chambers of the slight-of-hand mind, mine
or just the root thirst raven from the soil and nutrients, only
life.
There it goes, all
every lit window dampened by breath and caress
every dark bed cloth dried by press and unrest
how many of us actually in the room that morning or in all the rooms since,
how many of our bodies caress the moon with moonshine, how much desire or goodyear loss left
how many of us now in the dramaturgy of life have we
have we both learned this tumbling, together--
the persisting with a bag of coins brought back from the land of the temporarily dead, still countable.
Ask the bootlegger and the apple trees reaching upon the holler listening to the tales and takeaways.
Shall I feed you with loneliness and desire or the echo that scampers through the rooms of our life, renewed?
Something that sits beneath the incision and the reckoning, the words we spoon feed each other to this day
a god’s drunken smile burning the shelters of us both, a sun along the steep past
the perishing, the resurrection and the refurbished quotidian, every moment of life at last, forever forward
the living and the near-dead indivisible.
