Landscape
You can’t trust what you see
in the mottled blue and violet
around a black eye.
Real monsters are the ones
we don’t recognize at first.
Born at the crossroads
of metaphor and landscape,
where monstrous tales are made
and maintained, they appear
in their many forms and disguises
just when you think
you’ve already cried over everything
with a bit of blue tangled around it.
The landscape of otherness
is full of deviance and the blue
veins make the future seem grim.
The horizon that bisects
the painting you’ve worked so long on
dries to hues of blue no matter
how bright the yellows you’ve tried
to layer on top.
Monsters do much work
as they dish out heaps
of uncertainties to rattle our mettle.
Coping with monsters dulls the cobalt
of antique vases casting jewel-like
splotches on your white walls
to dull gray.
Though monsters always return
to trouble our dreams,
there’s azure, denim, ultramarine—
these can be merged
to paint the bluest
of blue moons in the night sky.
The Book of Minutes
Day 1: Trying to swallow
5:29 a.m.
You can’t trust what you see
in the mottled blue and violet
around a black eye.
I sleep through the sustained
peacock blue of two alarm clocks.
It’s worse the older I get.
First pill of the day
is ice blue. It melts
on my tongue into the moment
between no and the concoction
of the story I will tell
anyone who asks.
Real monsters are the ones
we don’t recognize at first.
My head is heavy
and outside it’s pitch black.
7:38 a.m.
Just when I think I’ve already cried
over everything
with a bit of blue tangled around it,
the dog jumps down from the bed,
no longer able to wait
to relieve himself.
I follow him out of the bedroom
to the crossroads of metaphor
and landscape, where monstrous
tales are made and maintained
in their many forms and disguises.
My head feels muzzy, heavy.
11:01 a.m.
More medicine.
8 pills this time.
The blue veins make the future
seem grim.
9:05 p.m.
Another night full of otherness
seen against a backdrop
full of deviance and exhaustion.
4 more pills.
Day 2: The body’s nest
5:27 a.m.
No matter how bright the yellows
I’ve tried to layer on top,
the horizon I keep repainting
dries to hues of blue and green,
dull and unremarkable.
First pill of the day:
the thyroid blue uptakes
into the circulatory system,
which is a closed scheme.
It never stops.
Blood loops through lungs,
diffuses through blood
vessels, branches
through veins.
5:39 a.m.
I sleep longer
While outdoors the tints
of blue lighten to the true value
of morning as the blackness recedes.
Again. I keep sleeping.
My heart is weaker.
My chest is tight.
Sometimes it burns,
like now.
1:23 p.m.
I read that Edward Hirsch
when he wrote his book,
Gabriel, about losing his son,
wrote for several hours
a day. He wrote a journal
not intended to be published.
Later he took four months
to turn his journal
into one long poem.
8:24 p.m.
Crying. Again.
Thinking of waking up early
and heading to work.
It’s getting so hard to do.
Day 3: Life-size guides
9:43 a.m.
Driving 65 mph past trees
letting go of their snow.
Clumps of flakes melt
slightly and drop
through branches
picking up more flakes
along the way.
4:55 p.m.
Doctor appointment rating:
only 1 star.
Crying as I drive home.
A dying heart.
New meds should
make me feel better.
6:21 p.m.
Inside my brain something
presses down.
Neurological things
are happening
Ten seconds of
praise but not to the body.
Seven seconds of
criticism of the lymphatic
system.
9:05 p.m.
6 pills.
Coping with monsters dulls the cobalt
of antique vases casting jewel-like
splotches on your white walls
to dull gray.
Day 4: Shadowboxes
5:28 a.m.
Praise to everything
In the world.
Praise to everything
In boxes.
Praise to shadows.
Praise to night lights.
1 pill.
7:48 a.m.
Steady rain.
Liberty blue washes
the distance and feels
empty without a field of stars
to light it up.
Sleeping late. Again.
Later I’ll write
letter after letter
to give in to the details
and to give up on facts.
12:14 p.m.
Exile.
12 midday pills now.
Monsters do much work
as they dish out heaps
of uncertainties to rattle our mettle.
9:10 p.m.
My head is heavy.
6 pills.
Though monsters always return
to trouble our dreams,
there’s azure, denim, ultramarine—
these can be merged
to paint the bluest
of blue moons in the night sky.
War
Failing to understand what he’s losing, my father shivers
in his hospital bed fantasizing in the silence of his dementia
that a war is getting underway in the corridor.
Are there blankets out there? he asks.
His blankets are kicked to the floor and I tell him yes as I cover him.
I pull the lid from a tiny bowl filled with bits of sugared peaches
and hand him a spoon. These taste nothing like the sweet peaches
that we plucked each July from our tree in the yard—
sun warmed flesh and nectar.
Grocery store peaches have yellow flesh and an acid tang.
Inside each pit is always a small speck of cyanide.
His eyes close as he chews. I imagine that he is imagining
juice dribbling down his chin onto fresh mown grass.
He starts to shake and throws the blankets off again.
Do you think they’ll come in here? The blankets?
Are they gathering together in the hallway to come against us?
War is a card game we played at a picnic table beside the peach tree.
War is his Air Force years during the Korean Conflict.
He points to the IV bag.
I can't talk right. I think they put something in there
to make me not talk. What's in there?
Why are my feet so cold?
I cover his feet. They are ice cold through the blankets.
I scoop some peach chunks into the spoon and feed him.
A lot of people were murdered here, he says.
I ask, Where? Here in Poughkeepsie?
He says, Oh, we're in Poughkeepsie?
I say, Where were the people murdered?
He says he doesn’t remember the name of the city.
I ask him if they caught the bad guys.
He says, yes.
Good, I answer.
Those summers with too much rain left small holes
in the peaches, leaves, and twigs, destroying them.
A nurse shaves his face today. It reminds me of peach fuzz
and of last month when his beard was long and grizzled.
Lewy-Body Dementia has left his brain full of lesions,
areas of atrophy, and holes, where memories fall through.
In his final years, peaches fell to the ground
leaving a pile of rotten fruit untended around the old trunk.
War is brown rot and fungus that ruins crops of peaches.
War is dementia. Every day.
War is an imagined army of hostile blankets.