Night's Thousand Shadows

1. deathbed There is a word that is not water, has nothing to do with heat or light, is unrelated to any one pain though the torn body tears itself further trying to speak it. There is a sound beyond all the sounds that I have made, the needs that one by one I've tried to name. It burns clear in the eyes searching mine, the lips beginning to bleed again, her hand squeezing my hand, pleading and pleading that I understand. 2. living will All afternoon in the afterlife of little things that love, or pain, or need could not let go of I hunt for the will that will let me let you go. I am distracted and slow— all the grainy faces in old photographs, letters from the dead, deeds to places that are only air, some bright nowhere of broad fields and sunlight that was my idea of heaven one long afternoon of clouds and steady rain when you sat and explained where a garden was, a well, excited by it, the hell ahead of you just a brief tightness at your heart. Outside in the yard, crickets start, cry here and here and here, night's thousand shadows growing tall. And now I have it, formal, final. I touch each keepsake like a wall. 3. going In the hard light and hum of the room to which I've come to stay, I watch the clock, and wait, and hour by hour begin to disappear. Movements, mutterings: the brain darkens like a landscape. Pain in the pale arterial hills flashes and vanishes, takes with it one whole year. Cotton and killdeer, a cloud looks down, something's happened in the wellhouse, someone runs through tall trees, breathe and breathe, is it my hand you hold? The fever climbs. You grow cold, then warm, now cold again, a hive of nerves in the skin. Some glimmer breaks through and I bend whispering as fear like a wind shakes you, I'm right here, I'm right here... Midnight, moonlight gauzing the walls, the iron and umber of intensive care: I watch as it swells and falls the puttied scar at your heart, and read each beat and falter on a screen and match my breathing to the breathing of a machine to know this time as it passes, each moment as it goes— until, early, you shudder and quieten, blood gases begin to rapidly rise and somewhere behind your eyes I fall in fragments away: a child surprised at his play, encroached upon by air, a shattered man near dawn, something about the way he holds so still, his hair.