April 2024
Bio Note: Despite it being Spring, the time of renewal, as usual, death is on my mind. These two poems are reflections on the loss of my two fathers - one biological, one sort of adopted. I have been fortunate to have had both of them in my life, and oddly enough, they died within five months of one another. I credit my father with my love of words and the nuances of language and grammar, punctuation. I doubt that I would be a poet without his influence.
Hawaiian Sunset
Before the house was turned over to renters,
still strangers, before the renovations,
before the turning over of the key
to the bank – before the trustee took pity
on my daughter and me, and left us
some privacy to say goodbye,
we spent a week with what was left:
a bed, two plates, two knives, two –
you get the idea. In the evenings
we sat in folding chairs and watched
the sun go down over the sea
where my mother’s ashes once eddied.
We said goodbye to the blood-stained carpet,
the puckering paint, the rusting window frames,
to the familiar view. Farewell to the presence
of the man we loved, moved to assisted living.
We even said goodbye to the flying cockroaches
surely skulking nearby, to the flip flop shoes
that we relied on to keep them at bay.
In the distance the volcano loomed, teasing
with inactivity. I learned that week how to let go.
The final morning they came for the bed,
the dresser, all that remained that could be of use,
and we drove away with our memories
packed, boarded the plane. I can’t say
we never looked back.
Originally published in ONE ART
Hospital Rest
My father’s breath rasps and bangs.
Wheeled beds bump down the corridor,
code blue over the intercom,
the ins and outs, button-pushing, chart-updating.
Pain on a scale of one through ten?
There is no rest for those of us undrugged.
Caffeine courses through veins in the shift’s eleventh hour,
the pulse so loud at times I can almost hear it
from the sofa bed where my head sorts its way
through the maze of sound, divining urgent from innocent.
The nurse administers morphine—
the word triggers an inner alarm:
images of death throes and agony, then
my father’s unnatural quiet, my stifled sobs.
Instead he settles, breath calmed.
The nurse returns, checks his pulse, turns him on his side.
He faces away from me toward the door.
The morning starts to creep through the dust-free blinds,
thick glass. There is no rush of traffic, no chirp of birds.
Originally published in ONE ART
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