Elegy
“She has a knee,”
the TSA agent said.
a pat-down situation--legs
in wrong position. One forward,
no, back. No arms
overhead. Same strokes
for all.
First flight since the insertion
of a prosthetic knee, first since vacation
in a cabin named “Golden Memories.”
I was watching the movie Michael chose for me,
Scandal Sheet, 1952, with Broderick Crawford and Donna Reed.
Michael was in the bathroom, place of danger. Was,
in fact, dying.
The squad arrived, positioned him,
applied the riveting voltage.
A tech set my I-pad
to the address but I didn’t know
how start route. Place with name
of hospital was shopping mall, closed.
Where Saint Dolly is a billboard,
a serene welcome, a beige lace bodice with a feint
of cleavage. How nice for her
to be outside all the time,
part of the scenery.
An hour or so before the attack
Michael had suggested we go the next day
to a magic show. At this, heart sank. Mouth said, “Sure,
I’ll go with you.”
What magic now and never, what baton,
mirror, slipped lock?
Arrived at Emergency, the first of grief’s little rooms
with its fresh supply of tissues. I didn’t see Michael.
He was being prepped
for transport to the city:
a pallet swung, a spinneret of wings.
I drove after, to the big hospital. Shut all down
one side, as if by stroke.
His chute-like bed. The black
board’s goal of the day:
Wean From Ventilator.
When visiting hours ended, I was shown
to a room filled with grief’s La-Z-Boys,
grief’s Barcaloungers. People on and off
cellphones.
The day before, we had cruised the drag
of Gatlinburg. It occurred to me that now
we would surely never attend
the “All-You-Can-Eat Lumberjack Feud
Dinner Theater, or dine again at the over-hyped
restaurant, its patio with a creek
like a bandaged pet stretched alongside.
State of the patient’s brain unknown,
on the second day its controls sputtered,
dials spinning, thermostats deceived—
the board erased. “Your partner is very ill,”
the nurse said.
The summons. The neurologists’ announcement:
“We feel we can be direct with you.”
--“Just enough brain stem for some respiration.
Imagine an aperture retracting, receding
as at the end of a cartoon.”
“Always assume that they can hear”
The brain, swirling with movies, had starved
into itself. All medicine too late,
though the heart pulsed, stented.
Unstinting.
Breath held too long while my eyes and brain took in
Scandal Sheet, while Michael was scandalously
alone then more
much more alone.
*
Death deranges the shoe size. The formal wingtips
would not fit. No matter. So apropos, the dark suit,
the Jesuit School tie
with mascot Blue Jays
midflight.
I was left alone with him, tissues
within reach.
To the touch, marble-like.
Not the igneous stone—
the spherical toy
knuckled down into dirt.
He had talked of his drawstring bag
of keepsies, ushered by manmade flood
down the 17th-street canal. Tigers,
Swirlies, Deep Blue Seas,
Green Ghosts.
He had talked of the New Orleans that called out:
Knife Sharpener, Genuine Hot Waffles, Taffy Wagon,
Haha the Icecream Man, Haha of today’s flavors.
Our trip to the mountains doesn’t end,
though Michael was flown to MSY in an outsized shoebox,
Human Remains. No seat selection,
no view, no warmth to lean against.
Doesn’t end, though I wrote
the owners of “Golden Memories ”
that my partner had died,
and the Jacuzzi, with its surcharge,
remained unused.
Let me hear that Michael hears.
In his fashionable Tiny House,
His burial plot in Metairie Cemetery,
near what was once the finish line
of the city racetrack,
he hears the chorus of wagers,
percussion of hoof beats
over hoof beats, the quiet
of laid dust.
I travel, searching the perfect vacancy.
I have sent memories out ahead. They gleam.
I have sent a knee.
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