Pelican Tracks

Family Possessions

 Family Possessions It is the mother they possess, Who gives transparence to their present peace. —Wallace Stevens Rotten grapefruit on the ovary, roadblock in the bowels, The liver suddenly a lie, rogue cells Raiding the pink frontier of the lungs— Cancer, thy name is lesion. Sucking the dry breath of forgetfulness, open to The lullabies of steel under the green sheets, She slept through the probe that peeled away The secret leeches, sponge lapping at the crosscut stitch. Nurse-news in the waiting room; tears and relief: Half the sick attachments knifed out, and half Still buried in the deeper reaches, and what’s left Sampled for the cold prophecy of slides. Pain promised; flashbacks of pain; pain its own sun and shadow. All those guilty checks we sent, laying in a lifetime Supply of trash bags from the crippled vets, Perpetual lightbulbs from the blind, all those dollars that bought A circus for burnt children, labs for the leaky heart, Now deliver their dark dividend, like prayers Whose answers fan out in multiple choice, Not one right item in the patchwork lines. We remember the night before, and the awkward priest Balanced by platitudes, placing on her tongue The deathtrip victuals of viaticum, and on her brow Oils to ease a passage into the next expectant life;  And how the odor of one lily, insidiously sweet, Big white earhorn for a deaf god, filled the room With a smell of piety that bullies and bedevils, Like the putrefying stump of an angel’s wing; And how the nuns, slacked in fashions five years behind, Cheered up the overcast with their breezy chat; and how Midnight swelled with premonitions, whispers too tired To rise above the level of the stricken wish. Now, rigged up to clear solutions that drip From a Bauhaus coatrack, eyelids lashed to the cheek As if sutured shut, she pries herself back from A world so blue and slow it seems the sum of unspent summers, And not this rain-begotten, rain-erasing spring That teaches us the alphabet of the ill: IC and IV and the robot purr of the CAT scan. Stalled over Cokes and banned tobacco by the parking lot, We talk ourselves around the random family years: Dreamsicles from the ice-cream bike; cayoodle suicide, A six-foot chain launched over a five-foot fence; Catholic kisses steaming up the sockhop chaperones. So much for the past; so little for the future. The last azaleas give off a glow like radiation, a wet Half-life of petals going down for the count, As in her veins the blood plates pale and disappear. Circling the bed cranked to an angle of repose, We stare past the Jell-O and statistics, sibling Seers of the th Sign, reading between the charts, The frets and forces we’re all dying to deny:  Shunt in the chest, that open wound in which Skilled hands will pour the toxic drench of chemistry; Turbans and permanent waves warming up A skull bald as a Dachau Jew; fevers rising Like a hunter’s moon, and fear in a swab of sheets; Bucket for the queasy heaves, brought on by Mopwater and the afterlurch of lunch; the lagging Plasmagoric siphon of life from a plastic bag. Day by danger, safe by degree, she inches out Across the barrens of the body, ghostland whose end Remains a promise of remains, like X-rays gazing At the bone-bottom, beyond the interrupted eye. And over the long wire, states away, where everything we love Comes back an echo from the brink, we’ll listen for Her quick of breath or silent slippage in the line, The ring of broken circuits closed at home. ...