You lay dying slowly, like you have for eighteen years.
I drive slowly, through New Haven along Highway 30
to visit you again like the "Spirit of the Wabash" belching smoke,
heavy-laden linked by a chain of train
cars filled with the crates, containers, and steel barrels,
the cargo of commerce clacking along the twisting rails
locked in the long journey of parent and offspring.
In the ending stretch, you have achieved a modicum of comfortable
complaining, like when I ask you how the sheep are doing,
commenting on the incessant bleating coming down the hallway
near the manger where the others in the fold
of St Anne's have gathered to hear father's monotone
benediction to the Virgin and her cooks.
There are no words left between us,
and I watch you unconscious, teetering on the edge,
on the verge of falling over, confused, wondering if it's ok to let go,
not so silently asking why it's so hard (to jump the gap).
Startled by the disembodied voice of a nurse over the speaker,
you wake with a jump thinking someone's in the room you can't see.
You stare blank-eyed at me five feet away, and then slowly
pull at the sheets wanting desperately to stand up and make the bed,
and for some unfathomable reason, to walk away to someplace else,
like the way your mother always wanted to escape out the front door,
to walk away down the invisible railroad tracks when she lived with us,
all the way back to Gas City, about a century ago now to her childhood home
in Otisco, to "ole gump corner" to see Uncle Duck and brothers Doll and Bud.
But you, who haven't been able to stand for weeks, and fell to the floor
the last time you tried to get out of bed without nurses standing beside you -
you brighten a little when someone says "Hello Faye!" and when your
granddaughters or my sister Ben are in the room. Yet the only one
to hold your sustained interest for any length of time
(not to mention your hand) is your "fiance" Jeff,
a man almost twenty-five years your junior.
You have told me again, and again, and again, that your “fiancé” Jeff,
received his permanent wounds (he is a paraplegic
with a significant brain injury) in the horrific
crash of his beautiful red Porsche.
You understand every word he says perfectly,
and he treats you better than my father ever did.
No small wonder, you smile. It stays with you, when a man
is always in some stage of unfaithfulness,
or is married to two wives at the same time.
Copyright 2007 by the Tipton Poetry Journal.
All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual poet and may not be used without their permission.