The Sign, and: Loose End

The Sign^*

Another poem that starts with geese across the sky
at the end of a day - the second when
its brightness is finally stubbed-out on the horizon line.
Now there's more sun on the bellies of these geese
than anywhere else in the world altogether. Incandescent.
Freshly smelted ingots - flying.
Then they dim. They're gone. It's the way
of the erev to only last for a moment.

* * *

Did they know, that Saturday night, in the fire
of quickened nerve-end pleasure, in their roll-around hour of sweet,
sweet sex adventure . . . did they foresee
what was started? Well,
no: it took a few months. And thirteen years
from then, in all of the soulfulness and gaiety
that attached to their only child's bat mitzvah
(she was at the lectern, and delivering
a toast to her guests: officially now an adult
of the tribe), could they look back and understand
that flash of reddish-orange neon on their dampened bodies
(Sunset Time Motel: like an external pulse)
with every shivering breath
was a sign of the erev?

* * *

John asked me: Would I be writing about it?
I didn't know. It seemed right to, of course.
It also seemed an inexhaustible jinx - to fix this thing
in written language, offered publicly; and since
it had turned out, here, on the other side
of a week of nightmare worrying, to be benign. . .
wouldn't I be positioning myself to one day seek out
and reread that diagnosis in the bitterly ironic light
of later, unluckier news? A week before, John underwent
his own "procedure" and, a stranger as he was
to the medical rituals, stepped out innocently from the prep room
in a gown he'd tied on backwards. "I think
from now on, it's a series of increasing humiliations
for us" - John's my age, fifty-five. Okay,
so let their bloody knife-work on my frightened and flickering
chickadee-of-a-prostate
usher in that age.

* * *

The instant when the sun entirely disappeared
except for them . . . something like those memorizers
in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Working to keep the dazzle alive, the way that "phantom limb" does.
And I heard them, first - the honking.
Then the arrow-tip they shape up there, in flight.
I suppose to a literalist, they're geese.
But to a student of the seasons, they're an announcement.

* * *

I was telling Mark the plumber about my little
invasive drama. He was on his back,
the better to reach the S-pipe under the kitchen sink,
and I watched his body involuntarily shrivel up
into a parody of the fetal position.
He's fifty-three. He doesn't want to go there.
But he's going there. My story is a door
he'll have to walk through.

* * *

My mother was at the bat mitzvah. Of course:
these are friends of ours. "Such a WONDERFUL time."
She even danced in her rose-petal gown
with a slightly tipsy military retiree
who dipped her over his arm as if she might be
seventeen again, not seventy, and every year
a feather, a giggle, a bubble of champagne.
Her coughing started that night. It was there
when she kissed the bat mitzvah girl on the cheek,
and when she finished the last
of her cigarettes and gave a sweetly sloppy goodbye to the parents,
and a check. In a week, the oncologists were starting her
on a regimen of the chemical immolation
that they thought (but they were wrong) would halt her own
interior burning. "Now I'm going" - she had always been good
at saying big things simply. "Going": yes,
migrating as far as we can, although
she didn't move along the hospital bed by a single lateral inch.
And now I wish we had a photograph
of her rose-petal night at the punch bowl,
lifting the hem of her dress so she could all the more riskily sleek
across the floor to the lame sax...