Night Watch
Circling my mother--
that lesser part of her,
the part mottled and bruised
and sunk small inside damp pillows,
the part ensnared in wires and tubes and clamps--
Are the square faces of monitors.
Their cheery colors flash in the dark.
Their earnest alarms chirp.
They dowse this room in ghoulish half light.
and puncture their own endless drone
with perky hiccups and bleeps.
They transcribe the chaos and complex gore
of cellular battlefields
to neat arithmetics.
To blinking lines.
This is the borderland--
The twilight no-man's-land between here and gone.
A place gasping for clarity.
This is that strange place where,
The overwide doorways along the bright corridor,
like dark, slack mouths,
Exhale the scent of decay and antiseptic--
that mix whose name is Desperation.
They breathe stories shimmed and gerry-rigged
and barely held intact with skinny hope.
Hope like a flute's melody line--
the one taming the whole symphony.
Skinny hope potent like any true thing.
It is a place where spirits roam the halls
when their flesh is too weak to hold them,
when the force of will and faith and cleverness
is too weak to hold them.
A place where those spirits brush
the fingertips of angels as they pass.
Angels invisible
and those sturdier ones whose rubber soles
squeak endlessly on the linoleum floors.
This is a place teeming with souls adrift--
Anxious spirits crowded thick as water,
rippling like water with each mechanical breath
inside my mother's limp lungs.
All that undecided life
collecting at the dark window glass--
Weighing the distance of the stars
against the battles of blood and bone.
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