Winter Afternoons

Winter Afternoons

                        After Emily Dickinson’s 320

You’re on the bathroom floor, they found you

there, or maybe just a she this time, one home

health care nurse, come to bathe you, soap

your hair.  I think you'd spent a lot of time there

on that floor, because near the toilet little pricks

of cinders pock the linoleum—its old oil self

startled for the brief heat.  What didn’t land

on your housecoat went down and stuck with

a ssssssssszt.

I didn’t ask, I should have asked, but I didn’t

how you came to be there in a sprawl.  The shock?

No, it wasn’t shock.  It was a long exhale, an out

and out that still came days later, your ten in ICU

the next ten in the morgue,  the crematory.

I wanted to be there to wait while you went in,

like I used to do when I’d take you

to your routine doctor’s visits and listen while

they tried to medicate your mysterious diseases.

You’re off the drink but somehow the booze went

solid and all you needed with the little cylinder

or lozenge or tip of your pinky sized pill was a little

water and all your pain, real and ghost, would be

suffocated like the new puppies you found early

in your marriage, how their pure-bred bitch

covered them with a blanket and lay down on them,

the warm weight of her something they took

for granted and never, not once, tried to get away

from.  Would I were a bathroom floor, or more,

you the floor and I your anorexic body, sprawled

like a crime scene, on top of all the constellations

your living ash could make—and come, without

fail, every night, clouds or not, moon or not,

and be an entirely new creation, the breath of gods

flaring out and in of brand new nostrils, brand new

lungs, brand new everything, and all that skin

you slipped out of at the end, just rise in a wind,

wind our first new-born gulp after we’ve swayed,

lost our grip, swallowed the last of a just

filled prescription.