The Fire Landscape: Poems

Love Poem for the Dying

Love Poem for the Dying On this dangerous street, eight houses long, Half the husbands’ hearts have had surgery. On Saturdays, through summer, one neighbor Strides shirtless behind his mower, and I Can read, from my congruent route, the scars From that autobiography of blood. Across the road, his car covered with snow, The music teacher’s home from Buffalo, From the cancer clinic where lasers cleaned His liver and kidneys, his maples wrapped In so many jaundiced ribbons he might Have sons at war. And I think of how he Watches me walk my skittish Spitz, retrieve My mail the way I’ve done the thirty days He’s been gone. How I lived near Buffalo For five winters of whiteouts, wind-blown snow Guaranteed each year. How all of our cells Meet their schedules, turning off like timed bulbs In the living rooms of vacationers. How the art of aging has been tested By the careful critique of fibroblasts: Divide and double, divide and double, Those cells keeping a sculler’s pace because Deceleration means decay, because 95 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 95 The end of the steady doublings is death. Here they stop at fifty; here fifteen; here Ninety: Human. Mouse. Tortoise. Which give us The variables for genetic math, All of those cells reading the DNA Novel from conception to senescence As if our hearts and kidneys and livers Weren’t strangled by the accidental cords. As if the natural death for language Were untallied, words like these dividing And doubling in rhythmic, exacting ways— Genes as similes, DNA symbols For heaving ourselves forward through futures With the oblique force of learning, knowing Someone, now, is working to fool our genes, Produce a kind of daylight savings time For our body-clocks, so, scarcely aging, We will smother the incredulous earth. p96 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 96 ...