More and more, and never enough, gets said:
in the debates between specialist and priest;
the histories of Purgatory; The New

Oxford Treasury of Death-Bed Wit;
and even in our elegies to pets—
the bubble-eyed goldfish and twin dwarf frogs

dead on the ninth, the first, the twenty-first,
our daughter waking to their buoyant
corpses belly-up in her aquarium,

its water wheel still filtering the water
weeks afterward.  The wash upon wash
of her chemo over, my sister and Joe

made a video of their marriage vows,
the garden center girl assuring us
a crape myrtle FTD’d to their wedding

would give lavender and white blossoms
quickly in southern soil and light.  Yet
her mucinous tumor took its time, regrew

according to death’s nature, which is
to defeat what music we make out of it:
I can no more delays devise, but welcome

pain, let pleasure pass. . .  The delays devised
today can go marrow-deep, like the stem-
cell transplant Don, our hard friend, came close

to dying of, coming back softer-tongued—
“lymphoma-free,” he says, “four years running
and counting on my five-year milestone.”

So maybe waiting’s all a life counts on,
the way we waited, years ago, as Don rowed
our daughter out across Lake Shaftsbury.

Their boat shrinking to a glimmering dot,
we tensed at any shout, or shift of wind,
until he doubled back and docked, the sun

a too-white bright on his skin, yet milder
than the glare of hospice light she peered through
the month my sister gave up food, then water.

“I’ll see you soon,” aimed at her sedated eyes,
came the closest I could to goodbye, plus
one valedictory kiss.  Backing out,

I watched her hands lift, take my hands.
“Two kisses,” she instructed, even though
she’d hardly breathed a syllable all day.

And once my lips quit the flaking gray
tissue of her lips, “three more,” she ordered.
In a week, blinking twice at Joe, she left us

no more care to volunteer; no crying
quarantined to the lounge; no rib by rib
massages until she slept; no more waking

to stomach bile refluxed into a pail;
no more delirious, gnomic sayings:
I know somebody, now, who knows I am;

and no more speculation, as when I said
“maybe it’s just a better childhood—this life
after death, I mean,” not sure she’d heard.   And her:

“I think my afterlife will be smooth sailing
in your memory.”  Which brought us back, then,
to the ferry ride across the Chesapeake

we each remembered differently, and yet
alike enough:  a foghorn, and therefore fog;
real dolphins, pacing us, portside; and lifting

each of us, in turn, to the rail for a view,
who other than our father?—sober, sane,
alive, or at least that’s how he looked to us.

           

From Goodbye to the Orchard, (Sarabande Books, 2004).