Have you never tried to hold ferns
feathery ferns overgrown ferns ferns rippling have you not thrown yourself on the ground to study the underside of ferns veiny leafy ferns ferns waving do you not see now how inadequate our grope for words, picture undulating tongues tipping toward the verdant do you not know how deficient this fumbling when once-fleshed girls, boys sleep under beds of ferns how futile to reach for ferns to know fern-ness to wonder what Plato would have said or Aristotle about the nature of ferns a keen green keening in sun stains ferns en masse a jungle of ferns all over your body ferns O little boy your voice never quieted it rasps on and I cover you with ferns By Reka Jellema September 2014 Not your death
or the Maui lip-curl surf in the poster above your head Not the knife-juggling French thespian I crushed or the jeune fille he couldn't save in the cinema Not the white pines looming over us casting shadows longer than the names of your meds those spindled pines aloof, cruel needling our skin Not the last frame in the last post-apocalyptic TV show in the last home in the last living room can after all the calico cats and Polaroids of Mom and Dad cleft us Was it how we grasped at hands clutched each breath close to the chest hoarded oxygen in tiny sips kept our setter's feathers soft to touch on the green couch your hospital bed with its accoutrements knobs and railings the trappings of an end glinting in late afternoon sun October-yellow leaves forever diagnose forever a settee for last days equipped with dubious apparatus the slurp and whir of the respirator an exercise in improvisation, this living these arteries full of toxins these veins and tendons elastic and sunken munchkin you shied from this living I hid with the Freud squad watching reality on a flat screen blood drug-muddied brain chemistry compromise the day the white coats bagged you this living this dog petting we had to reach to stroke our setter's ears it was our ritual he licked and licked cleaned your feeding tube your heavy lids half drawn watching fluids sink and resurface Not your death Not your death nor the Thai goddess bong hit incantations of Aurelio Rodriguez or sky miles leading straight to cumulus can after all the spit-up and graves dug Not your death or the heavens looming like cliffs can after all the chemo & burial rift us |
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