The Third Nobel Truth
It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder
to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the
heart…
Denise
Levertov
“On
the Mystery of the Incarnation”
He said
porcupines mate for life—he said knowing this
made road kill all that much sadder. He said the terrible
agreement a male and female make when lying
together was a great mystery, how
all those quills
descended below a layer, a fold of
almost fur, and it was
soft, and not a barb, not one sharp
point was loosed.
And he said their purr nursed all his
wounds.
I don’t know
what would be worse, inserting or removing, in-
tubating or extubating. If those hands that slide
the tube in were the same as the
hands removing it,
and throwing the switch irrevocably,
and wheeling
the machine to the corner of the
room, or as much
of a corner this curtained cube can
maintain.
It was all over now, the proverbial matter
of time. The space between us widens and shrinks
widens and shrinks, like its taken
over
breathing for all of us. Like its lungs.
And too
when your throat gurgles the way all the
beasts
of the nursery did, you call for
your mother
dead now nearly eleven years.
And soon it’s
just me and you. After they’ve made you
comfortable, after everyone else has
said
goodbye and walked away I stayed
each breath shorter and the length
between
longer. And it was hours of this. And then, quite suddenly,
it wasn’t.
The nurse confirmed.
Somewhere in
all, if I’m to swing back somehow the way
some poems do, the way suffering
always
does, how it gains height and
momentum, like a child
whose feet are straight out to the
sky after he’s pumped
and pumped and then fallen back
to the ground, somewhere those
porcupines remain,
and, only one now, since that’s how
all this goes,
the way a wet nose touches a dry
one, dry but bloody,
dry as night pulling away after a long wind, dry as this mourning arriving
and we both know it’s all cold again
and wet with dew, and
someone, some random someone, comes
to clean, clean you
and it all away.
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