"Palliative" [by Joyce Carol Oates]

1.

Hate hope!
Arsenic for weeks
we’d taken in micro-drops
on credulous tongues.

Hope the thing
with noisome wings
clattering
about our heads
with a broom at last swatted to earth. 
Stomped, smashed.

Now, clarity of silence.
Only the drip of minimal liquids—saline, Dilaudin.
Only the labored and arrhythmic breathing
as the chest rises, falls—rises,
falls.
Faintest of echoes--Give up on.

2.

Hold desperation
like a playing card
close to the heart
reluctant to reveal
what you feel
but (yes) you risk
the irrevocable loss
too late.

And so on the brink of too late
(when no one else is in the room)
(for a hospice room can be crowded)
(by “crowded” meaning more than two people)
you tell your husband that you love him
so much, what a wonderful
husband he has been
and he says—But I failed you by dying.
And you protest—But why are you saying
such a thing, you are not
dying, we are talking
Here together!—
And he says Because I am dead.

As after the final biopsy
he’d been incensed—They took my soul from me.
They took me to the crematorium, I saw the sign.
Don’t try to tell me I didn’t see the sign.

3.

Trapped in this bed like a prison.
Is the car out front?  Drive the car around.
Where are the keys to the car?
Joyce, don’t leave.  Joyce?
We need to get the car.  Where are the keys….
I want to go home.  Take me home.  Joyce—
don’t leave me!
What did we do with the car?

4.
In hospice time ceases.
Hours lapse into days
and days into night
and again day, and
night and the mouth
once fierce in kissing
and being kissed
is slack, mute.
And breathing slows,
asymmetrical
as a listing boat.
And fever dreams rage
beneath bluish eyelids
quivering in secret life.
Until at last the deepest sigh
of a lifetime…

5.

After such struggle
you must love
the unrippled dark
water in which
the perfect cold O
of the moon floats

-- Joyce Carol Oates
[First published in Salmagundi.]

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

I was confounded when Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature. I am ecstatic over the great Louise Gluck's Nobel in 2020. I will be totally thrilled when the great Joyce Carol Oates wins her Nobel Prize in Literature.

Thank you for posting this fierce, fearless, honest poem. Thank you, Ms. Oates. You have given me (and so many others) years of inspiration.

[Joyce Carol Oates]

thank you for posting this. I have read it in a state of suspended horror. though the experience was "mine"--- yet--- it seemed to take place outside me, & then it expelled me. I am totally stunned to see these words transcribing the indescribable as if, finally, it was describable; but it was not. not even poetry. no.
Joyce Carol Oates

[Emily Fragos]

Of course, Emily Dickinson wrote from extreme, out-of-body dimensions of suffering and grief. And, musically, there is the one-and-only "Chaconne," Partita No. 2, BWV 1004, by J.S. Bach, especially as performed by Hilary Hahn.

Thank you, Ms. Oates. My heart goes out to you.

[Caroline Seebohm]

Dear Joyce, all your writing is contained in this poem. The last stanza just flies away - and yet is so close to home. Brava.
Caroline Seebohm

[Terence Winch]

A moving & beautifully terrifying poem.