Two Poems by Arlene Ang (Podcast)
He breathes, and slowly, dreams of falling:
this is where we overlap hands, sometimes
voices. Moon waxes inside a bubble coming
down the IV tube; the night nurse calls it
the unavoidable extinction of bluefish, not
unlike pulling dried stitches out of a wound.
The oxygen tank is dark-green and gurgles,
refillable another word for tomorrow.
Somehow I keep thinking he needs a haircut,
20 ml more of water, some vanishing cream
on his legs. It’s easy to get lost between
Bach fugues and Fauré’s Pie Jesu like a scratch
in the vinyl record. Yesterday he talked about
going back: that pond where they caught
tadpoles, those lemon trees in the horizon,
his mother, brown-capped and smelling
slightly of burnt candle wax. A robin idles
outside the window: isn’t there another way
to say goodbye? At brief intervals, he wakes.
Together we listen to the gathering silence.
waver a pulse of rain, the evening
shallow and plasmic like an artificial
pond in late winter. The after-dinner
mint foil by her hand, waterlogged,
eyes the photographer’s lens.
Soil. Her left shoulder forms a cusp
of moon. She is anonymous,
like rigor mortis, the feral odor
of latex. Police lines throat a yellow
ring-a-round the rosie. She: bloodless
stump, the slaughtered doe.
Distant lightning glistens car hoods,
the coroner’s black shoes, her red
nails, the stillness of freckled skin.
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