Poet in the Corpse Garden

photo by Floris van Breugel.

Tropical birds screech from behind a dense tree canopy while I sit alone on the veranda in a wicker love seat. A ceiling fan stirs the humid, fragrant air. Squirrels scavenge in the thicket, sorting leaves, patting down nuts with a dusting of dirt. I sip brandy and work on the day’s poem while my love withers away in a brass bed upstairs. The hospice nurse sits on a dining room chair beside the bed, leg crossed over knee and a murder mystery novel pried open in a single hand. Her leg bounces, like the heartbeat in the bed beside her, irregular and fading. Don’t stop.

Her parents are coming tomorrow to talk me out of custody of our little girl. I think I will give her up. Not because she reminds me of her mother, which she doesn’t, but because I want to increase my pain to match my wife’s. I want to go through what she’s going through, so that she is not alone. Or is it so that I am not alone? Of the two of us, I was always the coward. Like now, like my poems, like this fear of the tropical birds and squirrels scuttling in the brush.

Branches form bridges in the blue sky, and snifters full of brandy hang from the trees in the hidden grove. I scatter her ashes in air, gentle dance of dust through rays of sunlight. Death is all around; I count corpses down in the copse, along with all of my broken art strewn about. Sculptures with broken limbs. Portraits rendered and torn. Her dust has not even settled over the thicket before sprites emerge from the green curtain, supple limbs and untouched faces of all the pretty girls I knew before. May I come inside, I ask? Just a moment, you say? Yes, a moment is all it takes, and a moment is all we have left.

Incubator Boy

photo by Heartbeatbox.

It was what he wanted, in the end. He rode the Greyhound bus out of town to North Dakota somewhere. There was not much ahead of him, but more than enough behind him. Little boy blue, nestled in his incubator, curated by the nurses to a thing of beauty more fragile than a faberge egg. Countryside flashing past, with a steady image of his disconnected face on a palette of green. His girlfriend was back there somewhere. He couldn’t see her face. Only a smeared image now that it has begun to rain.

The bus broke down near Fargo. He stood on the side of the rode holding up an old lady that reminded him of his grandmother. Too hot in the bus. The highway shimmers and fades in the heat vapor rising off the tar. Fiberglass shattered around twisted metal frames. Covered bodies in the passing lane. Wait for the EMTs and troopers to clean up the mess, the tow truck to haul away the wreckage.

He dreamt he would have had a motorcycle by now, and not have to schlep it on an interstate bus with these people. He dreamt he would have had a lot of things by now; a place of his own, a dog, a kid or— no, no kid. Children had never been in the picture. He was too much of a kid himself, still ate Frosted Flakes for breakfast, still watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island. He had a hard enough time figuring out how to keep himself alive.

The bus pulls away from the shoulder again, the overhead air nozzle feeding a lifeline of air to his lungs. Expand, contract, expand, contract. North Dakota comes but it doesn’t take long enough, not enough distance measured in mile markers. It’s not what he wanted, in the end. Maybe he wanted mountains this stretch of his life, land masses to block part of the blue, blue sky filling the vanishing point on the horizon. Maybe he wanted straight roads replaced by switchbacks, steep descents and faulty brakes, emergency escape ramps for runaway trucks.