Life as an English major isn’t as easy as people might think. Sure, we read books and
discuss them while math majors slave away at finding the derivatives of multi-variable
equations, but just because one sounds easier than the other doesn’t make it necessarily
true. Four of the girls I live with are business/math majors and they are constantly on
my back for doing nothing but reading chapter four of Frankenstein for the fifth time
while they pull allnighters and skip classes to study for their next accounting class.
In fact, they take it one step further by even saying that there is no real use for reading
those books and writing pointless explanatory papers and that the only reason I have
chosen this route in college is to “take the easy way out.”…
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“I don’t think she’s breathing!”
It had been the dining room before they had installed the hospice bed, had scurried in
with the paraphernalia of a sick room, had hoisted a dying woman carefully but without
ceremony onto the sheets and covered her in blankets. Little non-decisions taken by the
family over a couple of days divided the awkward rectangular room, now a bedroom for
dying on one end and on the other a den-like space for waiting. By the time I got there,
the room held a couch, a piano bench, a dining chair. It held a bedside tray, a basket of
ointments and drugs, an old woman stertorously breathing. Her mouth hung open and
each breath exited with a wheeze, entered with a rattle, fought to keep the air coming in
even as the rest of her body from glands to kidneys gave up the fight.…
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I have always lived by the laws of flesh
shrinking tighter and shorter each hour.
Now I’ve nothing to lose but cracking skin.
Yet curiosity stretches wider, too strong an itch.
In liquid imagination, I swan dive into
the pool of my widest eye, splash down
into the vast blue ocean of mind,
wash my bones back to the civilized shore,
where those awaiting my last breath
pick the marrow clean.
On their solid beachhead, my skeleton
has no heart, only a hard brotherhood,
where nothing more than hollow bones
lean against one another
and begin to crack.
– Robert S. King…
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The children finally fell asleep. The parents tip-toed to the closet,
unlocked the presents and positioned them under the tree with its
delicate glass balls and constellations of colored lights. Alongside it the
window framed the big oak in the garde n with the children’s swing.
Faint stars shone between the black branches. No danger of a white
Christmas, the children’s wish. The children thought in terms of
snowmen, not of fatal skids. The parents finished the second bottle of
champagne and went, unsteadily, to bed.
The wind woke them briefly at 2:36. At 3:18 he mumbled: “Blowing
hard.” At dawn the house shook them stark awake. In the grey light
outside they saw that the big oak with the swing had fallen a few yards
from the house, a chaos of broken branches.…
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We were in Rocky Point smoking rocks when Morgan jumped from the balcony. He
had this perfect running start from atop the bed and his inertia was enough so that all we
could salvage was his Hawaiian shirt. I clutched that cotton in my fist for hours. His
summersault was faultless, and he was smiling. Two seconds into his heroic leap, his skull
smashed against the sand-strewn concrete beside the ATV rental palapa. Being sunrise,
the blood was dripping tangerine and purple toward the beach and a crowd of
expressionless Mexicans huddled around the corpse.
¨Pinche pendejo güey!¨ locals said.
The policía paraded us through the streets. It was beautiful. Morgan with his head
cracked like a huevo ranchero, seasoned with ethereal leisure.…
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“Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.”
– Anonymous
Beyond the lamp-lit room is a plangent rain
—rescuing trees from their near-drought dyings
and I ponder the thousands of nights
—of our separate sibilant lyings.
The western wind that now does blow
—that down this rain may rain
blows not for us – or too much so
—shuttling shuttered pain.
Through colorful rooms we pass and greet
—snug from the night’s down-pouring
twined in un-twinned dreams
—anchored in our unmoorings.
The thirsty grass and withered stalks
—exalt the liquid ambrosia
while in dry and sighing rooms
—we unmake our beds of roses.…
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There is a tremendous amount of ‘seeing -to’ that our male counterparts never
experience.
The terrifying and sacred moments of intimacy that daughters endure and
subsequently cherish; the anointment into womanhood with the blood of
our predecessors.
My cousin, James, was steadfast and sensitive, concerned and sweet, always.
“It is hard to see Nan like this”, he confided in me on the porch, turning his head from
the May sun and my eyes.
I nodded, “I know, bud.”
And I did know.
I knew the tenacity it required to even kiss my grandmother hello without weeping.
To his credit, I have seen James carry an infant’s coffin on his nineteen year old
shoulder, and that is a weight which I will never know.
He will never know the weight of caring for someone,
the ache of being the maker of meeting ends,
the reader of omens and omissions.…
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