Tag Archives: death

Dog Years – Poem

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Dog Years

When I lie down and press my face
against the bristle of his body, and hear
his dog-heart in my ear, I think
how definite death is, his animal life
so much shorter than my own, so real
I can already feel the loss, dank
and heavy as his breath,
but loving him anyway, loving him more,
perhaps, because of it, the way I love
all things I know won’t last. Once
I was told that they have no sense
of time, that, to my dog, after I leave
it’s as if I never existed, but when I come back
he has no memory of my absence. And this is why
he occupies his time with bathroom trash
and sofa cushions, reducing all I’ve left behind
into a ragged nest of moments. And this is why
I think of death when I lie down at night
by his side: because his life without me
is simple, because the death
I am afraid of is my own, because each time
I come home I am born again.

Winner of the Austin International Poetry Festival, 2011


We Write Poems Prompt #80 – Bread Crumbs

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The prompt this week at We Write Poems was to accumulate twelve words, then write little snippets in response to those words. As usual I varied slightly: I took phrases from a Facebook page commemorating a young man who died last year. In each little stanza there’s a snippet from a post someone made to his page, with my own elaboration added.

facebook pages for the dead

melody says
she has lost faith
since clayton died

while the new owner
of his name
reassures her
he is in a better place

friends
post private jokes
remember the time

& his father leaves
updates
for him to read
it’s been a year
& we still
haven’t cleaned
your room

videos uploaded
in the night
here’s one of him dancing

dimly lit
& flickering
like altars
in dark corners
this is how I’ll remember him

prayers commemorate
important dates
I’m thankful for your
continued presence in my life

interpreting dreams
as more
he spoke to me
last night

as we are prone
to do
I woke up
and I still felt him
in my room

Destroying the Orchard – Poem

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Destroying the Orchard

Our parents took us there one winter
to visit a distant relative one last time
before she died – smatters of fleshy fruit
still sagging the branches, rawboned
boughs snarled as arteries. I don’t remember
who she was, or why she mattered,
but I recall the rigid rows of trees,
proper as stones in cemeteries,
each swallow of air a blossoming thorn
in the lungs as if each breath
were a dying one, the suck of soil
against our shoesoles like the garden’s
last gasp. Then one of us reached
to where a ruined fruit had fallen,
its heavy coat split and the bitter marrow
bared, then flung it skywards, a little sun
spinning above the skinny elbows of the trees.
When it returned, a joyous burst
curving back to earth, it awoke an urgency
within us for ascendance. Together
we bowed over and again, and vaulted up
our sticky gifts, arms stretched high
in adolescent genuflection, the strange sap
dappling our eyelids and our hair,
and we reveled in the generous violence
of our work, and we kept at it for hours,
gloriously destroying every rotten, wasted thing.

But Who Will Take Care of You When You’re Old and Dying – Poem

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BUT WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU WHEN YOU’RE OLD AND DYING?

When I am dead my friends
can send me off, tell
small stories to a sparse
congregation, notify
the local papers, select
the right burial dress.
Better yet, I’ll take care of it
myself, script steps in advance
so no one has to worry.
What I learned from you
was to rely on no one,
so when you ask
who will care for me
when I’m unable, I wonder how
having children excuses you
from such worries. I’d like the one
who gets that job to be a stranger,
and get paid for the burden; I intend
to be a lot of trouble when I’m old.
I want nothing I love to suffer
my undoing; I leave all my unborn
children formless and free
in the airy nothingness
to which I’ll return
when my work here is done.

For years this was the refrain in my family growing up. If you don’t have children, who will take care of you when you’re old? When I was in my 20’s I lived with a woman in her 60’s who made the outrageous statement that she had no desire to burden her children with her care in her older years, and that she’d already made arrangements for when and where she was to be moved when she could no longer care for herself. This was a shocking statement to someone who’d been told her whole life that it was not only her duty to tend to the elderly in the family no matter what (even if they never gave a crap about you or cared for you at all), but it was also her duty to have children to provide all the elderly in the family with more caretakers. It really changed my outlook on the whole concept. I’m not saying one should not take care of one’s older family members when they’re sick, but the idea that parents are just going to expect their children to tend to them without even trying to provide for and take care of themselves first before demanding it no longer feels completely appropriate to me. Besides which, it’s a pretty selfish reason to have kids.