The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sat 1/17/2009)

[RetroLounge]

Speaking Into Darkness

     O corpse-to-be
          Galway Kinnell

     This night mortality wails out
          James Dickey

1.
First it was the apple
in grandma’s bowel,
the way it grew to grapefruit size,
bulged beneath the hospital sheet
like a giant rotten egg,
flexed and swelled into death’s pregnancy.

It was also then my mother’s face
gone gaunt and pale,
her brown eyes drowning in their sockets,
grandma in the box before the fireplace,
the faces scattered around the flowered room,
their assorted expressions, gestures,
father flexing muscles in his jaw,
an uncle rubbing hands through my blond hair,
and then the knowledge in everyone’s head
that somewhere in the hollows of the deep house
you sat alone in the darkness behind a closed door.

2.
Grandfather, later it was your own sickness,
the way it shot up your right side like high voltage,
burnt the muscles out of your arm and leg.
It was the stroke therapy,
the way mother massaged your muscles,
the small rubber ball you carried in your right hand,
the wheelchair, the cane.

It was the failure of needles, tubes, scalpels,
stethoscopes, electrocardiograms,
all things that calculate precisely
probabilities of survival.
It was all the long days you both spent dying
while medicine lost magic by degrees.
It was the loss of magic itself.

3.
Faint eyes in the mirror ask the trouble.
Sometimes it’s dull fireworks
exploding like oatmeal across the July sky,
men walking like frogs on the face of the moon.
Sometimes it’s all the lusterless lights in Atlanta,
the foul balls carried home from Atlanta Stadium,
the splendorless ornaments
in the Sears and Roebucks catalogue.

Sometimes these are no brighter than shadows
melting into one night,
no brighter than the grain of the door
I have closed behind me,
the room in which I sit alone tonight
studying the way my life has flexed and grown;
in the oval mirror on the wall
the texture and coloring of my beard,
the hooked, bent nose,
the muddy eyes probing
the wrinkled flesh around their lids.
Grandfather, tonight I want to be that face
moving backwards into the mirror,
want to shrink back up my mother’s pink tube.

4.
Eyes in the mirror say
all systems shatter like dropped glass,
collapse like the breast of old women;
mythologies peel away like layers of an onion.

In a dream that recurs
Luke struggles in moonlight to roll away the stone.
By torchlight he unswaddles vital flesh,
examines limp joints, feels blood drifting through veins.
In his brain he rolls knowledge like dice in a cup,
administers an herbal compound.

Christ comes to Bethany in sunlight,
weeps before the tomb with Martha and Mary,
prays to God before a gallery of Jews.
In his brain he weighs
combinations of ontology and odds,
decides to gamble,
with his whole voice orders the stone to be rolled away,
commands Lazarus, come forth.

5.
And now it’s this lump
stuck in my throat
like the apple Adam couldn’t swallow,
the apple grandma couldn’t digest.
It’s the disbelief in my wife’s green eyes,
the way she seldom speaks in future tense.
It’s this mirror, this door, this bed,
this same darkness you closed around yourself
that time you came to this room with the New Testament
and held the book open all night in your hands.

Grandfather, I am holding no true book.
I have no orthodox dream.
My head is a kaleidoscope of crossed images;
a surgeon with a crown of thorns,
new life from the Good Shepherd Hospital.
And saying all this is pain,
like talking to your caught face hanging behind glass,
to the cedar chest, the venetian blinds,
my own eyes in the mirror.
Grandfather, I am holding nothing in my clenched hands.
Speaking into darkness is the closest I can come to prayer.

David Bottoms

***************

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. ~

:hug: