Old Rhythms

Old Rhythms

Late Music

She whose body bucked only once with grief
when my father's ashes
vanished in the vapid azure lap
of Biscayne Bay
is dying for big-band
music these days, the old devil
rhythm of the Sunday jam
has got her in its sway.

She's eighty-six, her voice
bears no trace of growing up
Irish in Boston, her clothes
sense undiminished, exquisite.
Commissioner of a league of blouses,
Imelda of pumps and flats,
mistress of pretense, moxie, fear,
she only wants the music
these days, the vibrating columns
of brass. The membrane thins,
a smidgen panicked she weeps
for joy, can't stop juking
in her chair and afterwards
phones me to ask, coyly,
if I think something's wrong.

The Internist's Rest

The doctor flees to an island
three hundred miles farther south
into spring. Just off the ferry
with his wife, he sees three deer,
a hawk skimming the bayberry,
the scuttle of a muskrat. At the tiny pond
right below their rented house
he spots twelve mallard chicks hidden
almost perfectly in frazzled gray cattails.

Walking up the stairs, he's out of breath.
He's been sick for a month with the flu
and with the flu sufferers who file in for a fix,
when all he can say is push fluids, get rest.
He knows nobody rests anymore.

Ten minutes after he arrives, he's down
in the basement on his knees, Teflon-ing
the leaky drain bolt on the water pump.
In the living room he checks his dog
for ticks that carry Lyme disease,
drinks a gin, fixes the tv,
and over a plate of linguini he expresses sorrow
to his wife at their loss of time together,
and the other losses, of species diversity,
of goodwill, of plain patients
who understand their mortality.

As he talks, he unpacks his birding scope,
sets up, focuses on the mallards' pond,
spots something he's never seen before,
a green-winged teal. As it goes head down
in the muck, its tail rises to give him
a clean sight of the infinitely variegated,
brownish-green mottling of its wings,
which he shares with his wife, while inside him
the flu breaks cover, routed by sudden beauty.