Podcasts: October 2005 Archives
In winter I wanted easy things: peeled
apples, strawberries with the caps cut off,
you. But in winter
no one leaves—only spring.
Sitting in my chair on the last
day of May, wrapped up. We are sad, almost
all the time. But with the snow
on the sill, I stayed
too cold to feel it.
Did you think I didn't love before you came?
Seasons only can be of interest:
berries that brighten, shrivel, burn
and fall away.
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.
Podcast of "On the Morning That You'll Die" by Richard Freed
