160 Illness poems

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that said low sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.

For Donald Clark Drugged and drowsy but not asleep I heard my blind roommate's daughter helping her with her meal: “What's that? Squash?” “No. It's spinach.” Back from a brain-scan, she dozed to the sound of the Soaps: adultery, amnesia, shady business deals, and long, white hospital halls.... No separation between life and art. I heard two nurses whispering: Mr. Malcomson had died. An hour later one of them came to say that a private room was free. A chill spring breeze perturbed the plastic drape. I lay back on the new bed, and had a vision of souls stacked up like pelts under my soul, which was ill— so heavy with grief it kept the others from rising. No varicolored tubes serpentined beneath the covers; I had the vital signs of a healthy, early-middle-aged woman. There was nothing to cut or dress, remove or replace. A week of stupor. Sun and moon rose and set over the small enclosed court, the trees.... The doctor’s face appeared and disappeared over the foot of the bed. By slow degrees the outlandish sadness waned. Restored to my living room I looked at the tables, chairs, and pictures with something like delight, only pale, faint—as from a great height. I let the phone ring; the mail accrued unopened on the table in the hall.

The nurse calls to tell me on Sunday evenings how he’s doing. How he’s holding his own in front of the window with a thousand channels behind the one that saves his screen with snow, fish houses, and eagles. How the days hang above the ice as vast recycled pages on which he writes in invisible ink. How the sun arcs across the sky, then breaks like a plate above the horizon. How the temperature drops below zero at dusk, then continues to fall till morning. In this way she teaches me how to speak to him in his sleep at his home in Minnesota, which is the same, she says, as talking to a friend you’ve never met, but grown close to nonetheless from hearing his voice. I hear the snow falling as she holds the phone outside the window. Silence is the sound of snow falling on snow, I think as I listen to the flakes inside the air before she closes the window. “I’m thinking of walleye in their sleep,” I tell my father. “Of catching them as they dream, then throwing them back in the hole I drilled by hand with the auger you gave me as a child, whose handle is stained with blood from my turning it so many times into the ice of Bad Medicine.” I wait for her voice to return, then say, “Just this for now since any more would disappear the lake inside his head on which he builds a house for us to fish throughout the winter.”

I So this is where the children come to die, hidden on the hospital’s highest floor. They wear their bandages like uniforms and pull their iv rigs along the hall with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale, they lie in bright pajamas on their beds, watching another world on a screen. The mothers spend their nights inside the ward, sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds, too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip beside their children, as if they might mesh those small bruised bodies back into their flesh. Instinctively they feel that love so strong protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong. No one chooses to be here. We play the parts that we are given—horrible as they are. We try to play them well, whatever that means. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. The doctors come and go like oracles, their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique. There is a word that no one ever speaks. II

Ampersand to start the poem, keep you going, there’s a Next Anne Cunningham Now intubated in white bed mountain range — Event brought you here and event will blow you onward. this is the refrain from Anne harm refrain from all harm events blowing forward gentle your train refrain from all damn harm Camp out in the mountains Under fluorescent hiss and beep. Nina (pet) put to sleep, ancient incontinent; Now you mourn blood Into your gastric tract. Noble body, gather your Guts, seal the passage: Have to die sometime but curving intricate Amerspand-tract says you’ll Meet us for breakfast. this is the refrain from Anne harm refrain from all harm events blowing forward gentle your train refrain from all damn harm

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train. We pass a junkyard and the bay, then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel. You lose your hat. I find it. The train sighs open at Burlingame, past dark tons of scrap and water. I carry you down the black steps. Burlingame is the size of joy: a race past bakeries, gold rings in open black cases. I don’t care who sees my crooked smile or what erases it, past the bakery, when you tire. We ride the blades again beside the crooked bay. You smile. I hold you like a hole holds light. We wear our hats and ride the knives. They cannot fix you. They try and try. Tunnel! Into the dark open we go. Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949–2017 the unified field It wasn’t that there was anything to say that would stop him from feeling this way — the X of himself splayed out in space where gravity was weakest. He and his father and talkative mother suffering tiny strokes that took away this syllable from this word, that syllable from that, all this lay in one pan of the balance scale while in the other there was nothing but dark matter and the cosmic inconsequence of his literal physical heart beating. And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness, bent down to his chest as if to listen. a toast to pavlov’s dogs Oh Leash held by a hand I can’t see, here in the laboratory where nothing can change and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack’s mentality, am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing of my lack except for how I bark, growl, and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle guided only by my nose that keeps me on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in? Why won’t you let me go free? The sad gestures of our growing intimacy is a reflex we can’t escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange. So Leash, here’s a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One, Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown. the judgment after the last What would we like to see happen? Would we like to drive nails into our hands? Would the shame engulfing us like flame on a computer screen make us understand that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking how far that match falls, is the original sin that a donkey’s ears twitching as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth about our consciences? How many nails will we need? Go to the movies, do research, be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill and that’s when we’ll find out just who we are or if there’s anything like “who” anymore. mission It’s not simply that the palm trees are on fire but that they waver up more fire than fire, brighter and harsher and more intoxicating than the flames spreading ever thought of being — the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight rears up in a wall that nobody can see over or around or through even as this nobody comes crashing through the screen right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times, he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames crawling over him have become his mission: burning, he erects a burning house of smoke we can neither live in or abandon. sunday is never the last day of the week Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb, who is to blame, who should have told us that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm our generation has had its time? In that corner where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other Monday morning trash, there are always two doors opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in. Why couldn’t we show our love for one another the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human, why shouldn’t we take pleasure where and when we can — provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn’t null. last rites Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves, mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust. What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say about the god who no longer remembers if they’re forgiven or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories, there were never enough beanstalks and giants and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin, they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints’ wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace, are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past. coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen Nowadays, in my cage in old straw, where my brother keeper forgets to come feed me anymore, at last I’m fasting for its own sake, not to break records I’ve broken a thousand times before. Besides, nothing could be easier than to starve forever if the food they keep on giving you makes you sick. This hunger is a moment’s vision that will persist in a pillar of radiant house dust.

After an hour in the infusion lab, Taxol dripping into her, fighting her cancer; after sitting nauseous next to a man vomiting into a Pepsi cup, she rose, palming the wall, stooping only to pick up a pen a doctor had dropped, giving it back to the doctor who had slipped it poorly into his coat.

There were two voices in the fever dream: Hers speaking from another room, and theirs, The teeny-boppers, singing from the screen. Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks, And thankful worries, who did what to whom, And why, and thank God it wasn’t worse, poor bastard, Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short Shorts, we wear short shorts, over and over Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last, Was out of it, and some one else, thank God, Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll, She let herself go when the bum walked out. Thank God they never had a child. Thank God They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog; Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang To me on little stages on the stage Where boys and girls were dancing all around them, Singing and dancing where it wasn’t worse, Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder Who to thank for just how bad it was.

I try to carry the gravestone from the darkness of my mother's sickroom— scratches of light around drawn shades— outside, the gold and red of autumn. She is like a queen in exile scraping with her nails on silk walls her message of anger, her weak insatiable demands and regrets. I want her to grow rosy old like a maple leaf, ripening, yielding only to that ice edged wind that must come and cut her down—like me, like everyone.