Saturday, April 11, 2015

The Third Nobel Truth





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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