Future Ship

Diabetes

78 Diabetes i often wonder what my father thought about lying there hour after hour in his bed, blind, both legs amputated, surprisingly gone.Already there were bruises on his arms, rotten spots that presaged more corruption, small clouds scudding in at evening meaning storm tomorrow, full-blown. He’d sometimes sung to me as a child: red sky at night sailor’s delight as if it explained anything, as if it were a charm against the real catastrophes of loss. ~ ~ ~ Each public death is a secret death too, as though a person had to die twice: once outside and once inside himself, dragging a lifetime down with him, an unknown world. it’s possible he had time to conjure it all up, set it in order, from the first flickering impressions of childhood to immediate sounds—groans of other patients, voluble tvs, a clattering of plastic trays at lunch. or did he just drift, rummaging through his ghost chest, picking out one thing or another? ~ ~ ~ i’m sure it’s possible to have a hidden life, a life not even your family knows about, not even your wife, though i don’t mean anything salacious, some lurid episode that’s easy enough to confess. in fact, he told my sister that an early love of his had died, someone none of us had ever heard of. i mean a life that’s hidden even from the person living it.At least partially. is that possible? A life compacted of innumerable moments which no one can ever quite recollect again. ~ ~ ~ 79 All i really know is that he lay there for months, maybe a year, his cataracted eyes veiled, the smell of urine crawling in tubes. But if we have anything like a soul, it must be a place inhabited by faces, a place of sounds and smells the body hoards up against… what? And the earliest are often freshest, breasting time with an amazing ability to endure. is that what he was doing, turning back into carrion these memories could feed upon? ~ ~ ~ i remember thinking: well that’s done,that story’s over though i’m not sure what i meant. i had the feeling it’s a story we could never know, and that the grief we poured upon a father touched a narrow part of what we buried, what we’d known. He lay in his coffin, lips sealed, eyes sewn shut, and i placed my hand on his shoulder—he felt like someone stuffed with old newspapers, the little anchors on his tie floating freely on a field of blue. ...