Skip to content

Log Out

×

Poetry

Sudden summer rain, warm on your back
_____like asperges slashes,
more of a blessing than anything

to get dolloped in the eye and laugh away
_____the shame of believing
in any kind of redemptive wash

to get to the glass door before the stroup of sky
_____spills, to be the chaplain
carrying in the far side of the walls.

Such an inconvenience to bring an umbrella
_____in through the ER
best to leave these skinny hands free,

too much weather for environmental
_____services to mop up
between toddlers and their foil balloons.

§

It’s impossible not to ask how ya doin’?
_____in the elevator for
the badge says I have to care, and for

three floors I do. Then for three minutes I talk
_____to a nurse washing a big
baby boy whose green skin sloughs off

like bruised fruit skins. He died before any eye
_____saw his angry face. And Job wished
for this? To move straight from womb to grave?

Or was it perfect immersion he sought,
_____to soak between his mother’s arms
suspended in pink-green marble
for weeks his mother either knowing or not
______knowing. Theirs could be no
broken, track-lit eternal pietà.

§

The jaundiced patient sleeps in a white sponge,
_____drying out, her husband
entranced, two quarters between his fingers.

His solace is a mouth firmly closed and
_____her wide silver gaze
as blind as her people before her.

Best to leave both hands free for hoisting her head
_____without spilling the coins
and for fetching Purell, which kills everything:

every body’s soupy human smell, the scent
_____of blood and grimy dust-mixed rain
on button-down clothes.

§

A den of comforters in ICU waiting:
_____Fig Newtons and pajama legs
looped over bright sofa armrests

squirming flannel piles watching a film.
_____A rote boy twists a Trans Am
into a phoenix, verse by hinged verse.

When the doctor asks for questions, he says
_____Why can’t you just put in a new
lung? That is, The whole must be preserved

in all its parts. I clock out. At four
_____am it is still raining.
The cocked hammer of a fat drop hits

a window unit. The gutters rush water.
_____A thin spout trembles beneath
a waterfall after the world tilts square.

And it tilts square for the baby and brother,
_____the mother and the man.
For the lost I think it flows straight up.

See how I twist the flume into a firebird,
_____the drops preened like feathers.
The world tilts somewhere for someone,

best to leave hands free for the safety bar
_____I don’t go anywhere near.
I just want to hear the water

uncontained, taking its own shape,
_____sky after sky full of it,
more than a blessing than anything

one drop replacing one drop on the skin
_____of a big metal drum,
the outcast maker of phony cold air.

Image depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

+ Click here to make a donation.

+ Click here to subscribe to Image.


The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required