News, 2001, and: Ethics, and: Dylan and Hendrix in a Jar

News, 2001

For hours that day I watched the news,
The shiny screen of assembled dots,
The voices talking, talking-

But this frenzy was more
Than the usual hash of excitement and blood,
Bad smell in the wind

That had nothing to do with terrorists, Al Quaeda
A hollowness in the voices,
Words that just didn't make sense.

I was glued to it the way one's glued
To the decaying carcass of a wren
The way after just a few days

All that stays is a soft moth of feathers,
Toothpick bones, and I knew
Something awful was coming

And three weeks later
My son was born after four days of labor
And barely made a cry.

No congratulations that day
And the thread of his life
Came from distant reports, phone calls

From the much better hospital upstate
Where they'd taken him before I could hold him
Or see his face

And with my liver enzymes off the chart, that fever
It was hard to hear anything at all
But I could hear his lungs failing

And I could hear them talk about
The bombs in Afghanistan on TV
Which also began falling that day,

The President's voice
Declaring evil
And I was shaking with chills

At the coldness of his voice,
This room, chilled world-
A President making no sense.

Ethics

I am waiting for him to wake up,
I am waiting for him to die.

I never wanted children really,
Ideas about motherhood, capital M

A different language
My own world

Narrowed to gym plates
And smoking cigars with the guys.

So when the EPT
Showed its straight pink lines

It was not by design and I fought him

By running up mountains,
Swinging weight after weight, treadmill sweats

You will not stop me,
Will not slow me back

Though I couldn't make that decision
To really stop him

And months settled into more
And I kept running

But painted his room in bright greens
And orange dragons and named him Drake.

Something went wrong
In the hours of his birth

That the midwives couldn't handle
And a long line of doctors

Young and cute, smiling like a troupe
Of male dancers in green suits,

Scrubbed up to cut me open, get him out
Already too late.

After a week of brain scans, lung machines
They said they could take his tubes out

And I could hold him for the first time, for
He was going to die, or live his life

With no more development than this,
A fourteen-day-old child's brain

And as his parents we had to decide.
I wouldn't hold him. His father did,

I turned my face away.
I stood there with nurses,

Their eyes on my face
But after five minutes

I touched my husband's shoulder
And reached for Drake.

His weight, his still face,
His open eyes on mine, I knew-

Knew for the first time that I wanted him
And knew that I wanted him to die.

Dylan and Hendrix in a Jar

When the insurance bills started to come in,
Each procedure under separate code,
Each brain scan, x-ray, blood screen
From three separate hospitals, each doctor's
Different reading, different charge,
Each on its own piece of paper
Was the first time I cried.

We'd done the funeral already
So lovely, a group of us
Bumping our way single file
Through the woods, the trail
I'd run on each day he was kicking inside,
My friend the philosophy professor
Stumbling and struggling with the Austrian pine
My husband and I had selected,
Pricking his hands on the needles
When it tried to pitch off
The rusted Sears wagon,
Rough and bump down the trail over tree roots
Me leading the way, making jokes
About that Faulkner book
Where the mother's handmade coffin kept falling
From the wagon
And she...