on poetry and dying…
I consider my work.
Are there fifty pages here
worthy of the turning?
My uncle has a huge bedsore
worn through to the bone.
Where bone is exposed
there will be infection,
the surgeon tells my cousin.
Telling true things well is difficult.
The surgeon repeats it to make sure,
then tells how he cut away dead flesh
and spongey bone, next to the gaping ulcer.
The wound cannot be closed,
no extra scrap of flesh to close it with.
The only things growing in the old man
are bacteria and holes…his mouth gapes
like the ulcer, slack white whiskered cheeks
sagging like collapsed sailcloth over
a whalebone’s jaw,
toothless, diminished.
The wind hisses over
the sand he is becoming.
How can I worry about pages,
worthiness, or turning?
My cousins turn their father
every two hours, despite his screams.
His knees tendons are locked close to his ribs.
Daily he shrinks into a mummified fetus.
Where bone is exposed there will be
infection, fever, delirium.
The sore is too close to the rectum,
hygiene impossible. Like the birth canal,
as some woman-hating saint once noted.
What is being born, here?
What is beneath the bone?
Sometimes my uncle answers
his children’s turnings
with moments of coherence,
as though the wordless hissing
of the ocean wind decides
to form syllables, in recognition
of the life it once spawned.
He allows them to feed him,
shows good appetite,
recites his Latin declensions,
gazes at the portrait of his grandfather.
~ Wry Welwood,
late twentieth century,
re-edited May, 2021.