In the Shadow of the Emperor's Malady
Mors certa, vita incerta
“Normal led to this.” — Ed Yong, essay in The Atlantic Magazine
Andante
your name the bloom under which fear once faded in the milk tooth morning light, the illumination of skin
but now there you are girdled by pumps and mechanics
your life bound in light aqua, lungs knuckled by trapped taps of forced air
a trachea tube penning history along the contours of your windpipe
our son acorned deep into the fabric of your oxygenated arms
as prayers fell like helicopter seeds
parental tree under wind toward scattered floor, the closed door
from your body born to its medieval keep
on the hospital window ledge soot and fractured light and a story remembered
a father bird protecting a nested hope in his downy ribcage, a heart of feathers
our ours
this blue breath flagging still through the cerulean shadows
the ghostly nights shall not abate nor venerate the ambulance’s wail
winging sirens gallop through the wet and forlorn night
trespass the dark barking on its way through the corridors appetite
scribbled words upon pads and prescriptions long after apparitions diminish
gulping oxygen, the remorse and the trepidation in the mirror of hospital pans
the boxed accordion sound of the pumping throughout the night
what then is left behind when the going have gone, despite
once antlers and young offspring, once an outgrowth that filled up the stories in the late-afternoon backyards
ancestors’ branches and boney roots
the light seeded and the farmland’s grown hoofs
have we learned what love loss shaped through the uninhabited
the gasping against the brick and mortar and city windowsill
the diagnosis shaped shadows shorn of sentiment
the first course of the heart to winddown the terminus that treatment unmends
the pulled weeds in the garden, the bruise of warmth in the attendant’s breath in the ward
what truth breaks in the sanatorium while death skulked the hallways
along the alleys and highways and over an argument tarnished with tea
an entire life’s plane novelized and legalized on a Lexington Avenue diner’s corner top
what now, what story, what frail rhyme
the names bequeathed us at birth upturned
dna’s burdening biological mark, the real sunmark of summer
the freckles on the heart
in a dream once you kicked up white dandelions in a field as small benevolences
and drew life from the taste of bartered oysters
the scent of the thin sea long from your hips to knees when you awoke
how shall we make up for all of this
what did we ever know
when did we ever “know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
when did the warmth of your hand on a broken and bare belly fail to suffice?
I will memorize your bones the size and shape of a once-overlooked word in the backyard years ago as long as language lives
